Rita’s book, the beginnings

Looks like I am involved in yet another book brought in from the non-physcial side of life. Here’s how it developed last month. Future posts will present the sessions one by one (today’s was the fourth).

Rita’s Book
2014 Cumulative

Saturday December 6, 2014
7:30 a.m. Well, Miss Rita, a dream tells me that you are ready to communicate – or maybe that you have been, and I am now, ready. It would be a pleasure.

You have had an effect on my life here, you know. Letting people in body know of our work together results in some of them contacting me, not necessarily being aware of it, which of course affects me here.

[I took this to refer to The Sphere and the Hologram, and my talks to Guidelines groups at TMI.]
Not an unwelcome development, I hope.

Not unwelcome. Unanticipated during my time in the body, certainly!

I suppose so. I seem to remember hearing that Bob Monroe was concerned about people trying to contact him being a problem – though come to think of it, that may have been people just talking. So, Rita, open for business. Those lovely months communicating nearly every day with Papa [Hemingway] came only after you were gone, so we never had a chance to discuss any of the process or contents.

You needed to do it on your own anyway. It had to be your process.

I guess. So – did you have something in particular you wanted to start with? Or did you already?
That’s as good a place to start as any – the continuing interaction between those in and those out of the body, not necessarily known to those in body, but real nonetheless. There is a tendency to think of life in the body as an interruption of life outside it, as though we come into form, have a lifetime’s worth of experiences, and then report. But it doesn’t work that way. I’d like to correct the picture, but it can’t be done in a hurry.

Well, I got the sense, the other day, that I was being primed for a new set of lessons. Didn’t guess that it was going to come via an old friend rather than anonymous “guys upstairs.”

You did get, by “accidentally” coming across that passage in the Hemingway book you brought forth, that your understanding to date was merely provisional unless you lost your nerve or your appetite for further refinement and redefinition.

Then let’s begin. We’re going to begin in a place that will perhaps surprise you, telling you what you think you already know, but hang on for the ride and see. The first statement:

1. “This side” and “the other side” are in continuous unbroken communication, regardless what it feels like to those in body.

Some, like you, won’t find anything to object to in that statement, but in fact, in day-to-day living, in ideas as expressed in action, few if any live that reality. In fact, in actual living, you live as though communication exists only when you intend it, or are aware of it.

This is not “good” or “bad”; it is how the separation of 3D life leads you to experience (or not experience) that aspect of life. But your life is bounded by your expectations of life, and we’re interested in expanding these expectations.

The idea that there can be a separation between physical and non-physical stems from the idea that different substance is involved in either realm. As you were told pretty much right away, there is no difference between beings in the physical and in the non-physical except the conditions of the terrain each is on.

In other words, although it is convenient to talk of different beings, in truth we are all part of one thing – the “everything” – in a way you can’t yet imagine, which I am going to try to help you with. Many of the contradictions between systems disappear if you see that all is one.

“All is one” – it is a New Age cliché – but what does it mean in practice? Next time.

Sunday December 7, 2014
9:15 a.m.
Yesterday was “continuous communication,” and I said today’s would be “all is one,” so let’s look at that.

Material given to you when you and I were doing sessions, and in fact before, tell you that it is a mistake to think that there is any such thing as an individual in the way the “modern world” thinks of individuals. But, as you were also told, neither is the other side shapeless jello. Rather, one productive way to see things is as an endless cascade of communities, each of which – anywhere up or down the scale – could be experienced or conceptualized as an individual.

You sort of got that, and sort of didn’t, so let’s look at it a little closer.

You need to expand your focus sideways, so to speak. Not only do you need to try to keep in mind the great chain of being, you need to remember that every link of that great chain also extends to the non-physical, because everything is one thing, as said. There can be no absolute separations in a fabric, and all reality is one fabric.

I feel like we’re beating a dead horse, restating this, but different people will require different ways of seeing it, and the same people will require different ways at different times – partly because different people are in charge at each different time. (That is, a person, being a community, will find that community dominated now by one, now by another, member.)

Beating the horse or not, here goes again:

Any division is only provisional and for the sake of convenience. Buddha said when you start to make distinctions, you start making errors. I don’t think he meant that a snake and a bowl of rice are the same thing (after all, “all is one,” right?) – he meant, the snake and the bowl of rice do not exist in isolation regardless what the senses report.

It is certainly true that we must make and observe distinctions in life – and that by the way means non-physical life no less than physical life, for here too, although the strands that connect everything are obvious, so are the individual communities, which is why I am communicating with you and not a rock. But it is equally true that we misunderstand the nature of reality if we forget that nothing exists unconnected to the whole.

Now, so far so good. What I’ve said is still New Age cliché. But you have to build on something, and if you don’t have the foundation, agreed upon, some people’s castles, at least, are going to be built in the air.

So, all is one; let’s look closer.

A molecule, an atom, radioactivity, anything you can name – it all has its non-physical component, however little obvious it is.

These two ideas are often held in different compartments of people’s minds – the great chain of being, the connection between physical and non-physical. The lack of connection between the two concepts makes for distortion.
Perhaps this is enough for today, though less than I had hoped. It may be as well – given that you are broadcasting these sessions live, so to speak – to let people ponder on that connection before building on it. Everything is all connected – on the physical side. It is all connected, on the non-physical side, as well. And it is connected at every level between physical and non-physical. This is an important concept, much more important than it seems at first blush. If it is kept in mind, gradually it changes everything.

Here’s a way of thinking about it, building upon a thought you have had more than once. It is obvious that however many dimensions exist, anything that exists exists in all of them, by necessity. You could not live in height and width but not in depth. You could not live in height, width, and depth but not in time. If a dimension exists, you exist within it, regardless how you misperceive it, or fail to perceive it. As you have been told, reality has more dimensions than people typically experience, and all the dimensions they do not experience, or they misperceive, are crammed into their experience of [the nature of] time. As they learn to distinguish elements of other dimensions, the nature of time, as they perceive it, correspondingly changes, for it then reflects less of the misperceptions that it previously had reflected.

The nature of time doesn’t change. The experience of the nature of time does.

It might be worth your while to start to think about the non-physical as additional dimensions of reality, rather than to make a distinction between physical and non-physical. The advantage of reconceptualizing in this way is that it will gradually entice you to remove that seemingly impermeable barrier – the “veil” – between physical and non-physical.

That’s the theme anyway, isn’t it? Cease regarding the non-physical as something separate from the physical, something awe-inspiring and – well, something other than part of normal life.

That’s right. You’ve laid good groundwork for that, by seeing your guys upstairs – of whom I am now one, you’ll notice! – as people rather than demigods or statues. More another day.

Monday December 8, 2014
So. Both “sides” communicate; all is one; it turns out, there are not two “sides” at all, but one undivided reality in which perceptions determine characteristics. That is, as your perception clarifies, you become able to differentiate characteristics that had been lumped together as characteristics of “time” or had been missed entirely.

Now add this – another huge jump for some, especially those rooted in the scientific tradition. And trust me, I sympathize, because I lived my life in that tradition even to the end. Everything is alive, and sentient, and, of course, interacting.

Doesn’t seem like much of a jump? Well, consider: You have just left the world of dead objects floating in empty space, and have, you might say, re-entered the medieval or ancient world-view through a different door.
To find the blindest spots of the world-view you have grown up with, look precisely to those things it condemns as superstition. That isn’t to say that every superstition is a legitimate way of seeing things; it is to say that the ways of seeing things that are most antithetical to the prevailing world-view are going to be condemned as superstition because they are going to seem obviously nonsense.

You, Frank, will find this a small step, not only because of your Catholic background that you learned to appreciate, but because of your own experiences and reading. But trust me, some will find this a terrific obstacle.
All the world is alive. All of what is called the physical world partakes of the dimensions usually called non-physical. This can only mean that either everything is “spiritual” in nature, or nothing is. There is no separation into spiritual and non-spiritual, any more than into living and dead, or sentient and non-sentient.

Now, obviously, this isn’t how it appears in the three-dimensionally-experienced world. It is only when one escapes the limitations either by dropping the body or by achieving mental clarity that the truth of what I’m telling you emerges.

It must be understood: Life in the 3D world is one of deliberate structured limitation. While functioning in a world with a body, blindness to a greater reality is possible and in fact likely. But it isn’t necessary, and can easily be overcome by a movement of mind, or shall we say spirit.

And this will be another fact to be addressed. Things you see as separate are usually the same thing seen in different contexts, or experienced in different ways. Thus, “mind” and “spirit.” Same thing, in a way – a continuum with mind on one end and spirit on the other, if that’s any easier to visualize. Just as color is a continuum, with any given color being one stop on the dial, so mind and spirit are more like two ways of conceptualizing than like two different things.

Let me try that again. Orange is not necessarily an absolute, distinct from yellow on one end and red on the other. It could be described, and experienced, either way, and each way would be relatively true except in so far as each explanation tended to exclude the other.

This is a rule of thumb to keep in mind: Any explanation may have value, but it will have the inherent shortcoming of seeming to exclude contradictory explanations. Logically, it follows that any one thing excludes its opposite. But in real life, as opposed to two-value logic, exclusions function mostly as strait-jackets, preventing you from turning to see the same thing from another point of view.

To return to the main point and proceed: If everything is alive – and it is – and everything is sentient, and connected, and partakes of the nature of all dimensions regardless of 3D appearance – then perhaps you can see why the ancient and medieval world-views understood the world to be peopled with spiritual energies. It is. And the modern world’s blindness to those energies served the purpose of creating a new way of seeing, but the usefulness of the limitation has been outlived. A new spiritual scientific view is possible that would not have been possible but for the scientific view of the past 500 years, and won’t be possible until that older view is heavily amended.
[Re-reading this, I see that perhaps I should add Russell Targ told me years ago that two-value logic is not as accurate as four-value logic. Two-value logic says either A=B or A<>B. Four-value logic recognizes two additional intermediate conditions, one in which A is both B and not B, and one in which A is neither B nor not-B. I predict that this too will be an obstacle for some people. We’ll see.]

Thursday, December 11, 2014
7 a.m. Feeling a little stretched, Rita. So, missed yesterday deliberately to concentrate on Papa’s Trial. Shall we continue? I’ll glance back at the material first unless you don’t think I need to.

Always a good idea to give yourself a reminder on an extended topic. Some need it, some don’t. Jane Roberts, other trance mediums, didn’t need to, and in fact who knows, perhaps it would have interfered with their getting out of the way. But people who are going to be part of the on-going process, as you are, may or may not want to bolster their own confidence by taking a sneak-peek at the material.

Then I will. Back before you know it. [A fast look.] But, I see I hardly have the energy to absorb anything. Maybe just as well. So, over to you.

You will notice, Michael [Langevin]’s suggestion that you try for something tangible that could be proven does not appeal to you.

No. And I’ll explain when I transcribe. [Michael suggested I ask Rita for information that she would know and we would not until we checked, as a demonstration that it was really her I was in contact with.]
There is a reason why it doesn’t appeal, and it is more than a matter of lack of self-confidence. It is a terrible example to set, to set oneself up to be judged on anything but the intrinsic resonance of the material for this or that individual. You’ll notice this resonance subject came up in your comment to the TMI Explorers list.
It is important for beginners to build their own – shall we call it “provisional confidence”? You have to try it, treating it as if confident of the process and result, then let it sit and go back and judge later. As you have told people in groups [such as Guidelines programs], information received is usually going to appear to be from yourself while you are receiving it; if you try to judge too soon, you are likely to dismiss valid material without weighing it properly, because of how the process felt to you. It is only later that you will be able to have enough distance on it. Well, setting yourself up to produce verifiable material “or else” only puts you under more pressure and increases the temptation to abandon the whole process. That’s one objection. A deeper objection is that it results in your trying to direct the process from your end rather than accepting what comes through.
Well, I don’t know – how different is that from our asking questions? Doesn’t that direct the process?

There’s a subtle difference. Asking for information on a given topic isn’t the same as asking for information that will provide confirmation. The one is asking for the sake of knowing, the other is asking for the sake of demonstrating.

Can’t say I really see the difference. I’d love to know from you or from anybody where my lost set of keys is.
No doubt. And if this were only a product of your subconscious mind, the information would surely be there, would it not?

The whole thing is a mystery to me. I concluded long ago that there is a knack or orientation that others may have but I don’t, that might produce such things.

Pray to St. Anthony.

It’s funny you should mention that; my friend Michael Grosso mentioned that practice – in a different context – the other day. How different is the tradition of praying for assistance from a saint, on the one hand, and seeking assistance from any other disembodied source”

The difference would be in the person making the request, of course. Whatever you believe it, it will tend to work, or at least work better.

This has taken us far afield.

Has it?

Well, come to think of it, it was you that mentioned Michael’s suggestion.

And you who made a semi-conscious decision to glance at your emails before opening the journal. You would not have seen the message otherwise, and it might have been more difficult to steer the subject this way.
Proceed, I’m listening.

It is a simple everyday example of the fact that individuals are individuals only so far. At a deeper level, that both is and is not a valid way to look at it.

Jung saw an individual consciousness surrounded by the unconscious. In other words, what we are aware of in the body is like a flame, a small flame like a candle flame, in the middle of a great external darkness. At least, that’s how the exterior appears to the flame, relatively darker. “Flame” is not a bad analogy, if you will bring the image to mind. The boundaries and shape of a flame are ever-changing, and it doesn’t look the same very long at a time. Even disregarding its coming into existence and its being snuffed out, its lifetime is perpetual change with an overall continuing identity.

A flame. Not a bad analogy for a consciousness in body.

But when you look to see what is outside the flame, it gets more interesting. Jung’s thought was of conscious minds as a more or less stable thing sitting atop the things in their lives that had not come to the conscious mind’s attention, or had fallen out by inattention, or had been repressed for whatever reason, and beneath the personal layer, deeper connections such as family, ethnicity, race, humanity and still broader connection to other parts of reality, but parts too far removed from the immediate problem of the living to be explored in his short lifetime. (That is, any one lifetime is short.)

But let us change the analogy and see the individual as one flame, say sitting on a twig of a campfire. Maybe the fire has a hundred such flames. They could all be considered part of the greater flame or could be looked at individually as a hundred twigs burning.

Either way, you will see that the flames at some level are the result of the conditions for fire: heat, air, and fuel. So, although the flame could be considered only in itself, to do so without remaining aware of the conditions of its existence is to misinterpret what you see. A flame is the twig is it burning; is the air it is transforming; is (because equally dependent upon) the heat beneath which it cannot operate.

So it there an individual flame at all? Even taking that campfire as one thing – which is another arbitrary division – can it be said to exist in and of itself? Only if you disregard the air, fuel and heat that are absolutely a part of its existence. But how often do flames think to include twigs in their genealogy?

I’d add, how often are they even aware of them, being concentrated as they are on flame-dom, fire-hood.

That’s right. That’s the point. It is all well and good to assent intellectually to the proposition that all is one, and the individual is a convenient fiction – as the guys told us – or a provisional hypothesis. It is a more emotionally stable thing to have an image such as a fame, to bring the idea home.

And this is the direction we must go. Is it any wonder that materialists can’t see how the individual survives the conditions of death? The flame has no more twig to burn! There may or may not be air and heat, but the twig is demonstrably gone! So how can life continue?

That’s very striking. It gives me for the first time the emotional sense behind the idea of death as the end. That may not be news to others, but I never quite saw that before.

Yes, because it hasn’t occurred to them that the heat is provided not by physical conditions of existence but what we have been calling non-physical. Heat, and air both. But we’ll get to that later. You will notice that when Nancy [Ford] asked about physical and non-physical, she got the word and concept “density,” and that – although an entirely different analogy – gives the sense of it very well. Again, a continuum, not an either/or.

Well, as Car Talk used to say, we’ve done it again, we’ve wasted a perfectly good hour –

We’re ready to waste another, whenever you make the opportunity for us.

That reminds me, here’s an idea. You, Rita, will be familiar with the idea of cross-correspondences. Why couldn’t we bring your material forth that way – centering on the TMI Explorers list, say – and thus bring it quicker, with less wear and tear on one particular scribe, and in the process providing a real demonstration of what you’re talking about.

The only obstacles to such a process would be among you individualists. (A smile.)

If you can persuade yourselves it is possible, and
If you allow yourselves to think yourself inherently worthy, and
If you take the results as provisionally true – that is, neither Gospel nor evident fraud or error –
You may surprise yourselves.

Well, I’m willing if anyone else is. I guess we’ll see. Thanks, Rita. More another time.

Friday, December 12, 2014
7 a.m. I woke up suddenly, thinking of the question I’m really trying to get to. The two ways of looking at consciousness don’t cohere, and I think if we are on the right track it should make sense of things. We haven’t done that yet.

OT1H – The analogy of the flame is very nice, and clearly we aren’t as separate from others as we sometimes think.

OTOH – If there is a continuing Ernest Hemingway presence, say – or a Rita presence! – how does this square? How can we be both separate and not separate? I can’t even phrase the question very well. What was clear in my mind does not come out clear in words.

Miss Rita, that as good an attempt as I can make. I hope it’s good enough for you to run with – and of course, I am well aware that, chances are, the question was planted.

Let’s start with homely analogies. You live in a place – the house you lived in when you rented from me, say. While you are there, that is your life’s center. Your body lives there, and that is where you do your work. You think, you read and write, you communicate, and all your activities, mundane and mental both, take for granted your existence there, on Roberts Mountain Road. You don’t think you are the house, or the community where the house is, but you take for granted that this is your context.

You move to another house, another community. Your memories are the continuity with the consciousness on Roberts Mountain Road, but your new surroundings are your new life’s center. You are the same person as before, yet you are also not the same person. You today know things, have experienced things, have perhaps suffered and enjoyed things, have forgotten things, that the “you” living on Roberts Mountain Road had not. Yet obviously you are a continuity.
So if you look at things as flow, you have to say you changed, time passed, that earlier version of you no longer exists, and no one can say that this is an incorrect summary of the situation.

But if you look at things as a series of situations – snapshots instead of movies, or perhaps better, stills from a movie – it’s different. If every moment of time exists, and does not cease to exist, the snapshots, or stills, are as accurate a description as the movie.

So – are you a continuity? Yes. Are you a definite defined being? Also yes. The confusion about reincarnation and about life in general is rooted in a misperception of time which is rooted in a misperception of reality due, as I indicated earlier, to imperfect apprehension of higher dimensions of reality, collapsing and confusing them into one’s perception of time. As one clarifies one’s perceptions, the nature of things changes. In effect, one lives in a different world.

All right, and this ties in to the nature of us as communities.

Yes, because it both is and isn’t a mistake to think of continuity in terms of continuity of a given unit. The “you” who lived in my house for those few years did not continue as a unit to move to a new dwelling in another place. As I said, the “you” writing this is not precisely the same “you” as the one of a few years ago. You couldn’t be the same and still experience, for experience alters. And such sequential alteration is the purpose of 3D life, after all. The physical end of things is the hothouse, forcing plants.

But if we leave off thinking of the individual as a unit and think instead of each person as being a community, it may be easier to conceptualize how different members of that community may be more activated or less activated by changes in circumstance. If you cease to live in the woods and move to the city, the part of your community that loved to walk in the woods may become quiescent, and the energy of the over-all unit flow elsewhere, to social interactions, or libraries or whatever.

Two ways of seeing things, both true, neither the whole story.

As I was writing that, the thought came to me, each of the pieces of that individual’s community were themselves individuals at some point.

Again, both yes and no, but that will advance the argument. Take an historical figure: Thoreau, say, or Abraham Lincoln, to take two of your favorites.

Or Ernest Hemingway.

Or Ernest Hemingway, but also anyone else who has ever lived, known to history or not. That bundle becomes a strand available to other communities downstream – but not upstream – in the formation of new individuals. That is, after Lincoln lives, his life as a whole provides material to be a strand in a person, as for instance he is in you. Before he lived, he was not available except by reflection.

You’ll need to say more about that.

Oh, I know it! But, you see, we’re getting somewhere. As I told you a few years back, sometimes, in order to understand A you have to understand B, but to understand B you have to understand A, and in such cases all you can do is keep inching closer by continually refining your understanding of either, then reconsidering the other in the new light, and continuing the process.

Stepwise refinement, in metaphysics.

Did you think your time as a computer programmer was wasted? You learned certain skills, learned certain concepts and ways of thinking.

So next we need to look at the nature of time. It is true that time exists. It does not flow, consciousness flows, and in the body it is experienced as flowing one way and one way only. There is a reason for that. It is experienced in a way that echoes the reality of change.

Consider the pyramids, to use your old example. You cannot tear them down before they were built. You cannot write on the walls of a building before it is erected. You can’t marry a person before he or she is born. There is a sequence to things, and it is not arbitrary. It has its inherent logic.

Just because time is not what it appears, does not mean it can be anything and everything someone can imagine it to be. Every moment of time exists, but it exists, as you exist, as the sum of what preceded it, and as the seed of what will follow it. The fact that the movie may be viewed out of order, and the stills considered separately and at random, does not mean that the movie itself is out of order, separate or random.

So, to return to Lincoln, he is available as a package, as a new unit, as a new strand, for individuals, downstream from his life. But prior to 1809 there was no Lincoln (thank you for the date, which I plucked from your memories). Prior to 1809 the strands that went into the making of Lincoln existed, but the net result of his life – the container as it was frozen by the end of new 3D experience by death – did not. After 1865, it did.

When you and I got this material a dozen years ago, that part was never spelled out clearly. The guys – as I thought of them (and still think of them, pending a new way of thinking about them) – talked about patterns, and they said some patterns were worth keeping and others weren’t, and at the time that seemed to you like they were saying some were worthy and some people weren’t.

You weren’t able to give us a very clear picture at that point, because the concept was too unfamiliar, and your mind couldn’t help trying to make sense of what you were getting in light of where you were, what you knew. What would have been clearer would be to say that some people’s lives create a new pattern that can be used as one strand in a new bundle, and many people’s are not sufficiently different to serve in that way. That doesn’t mean the ones that are not different enough to serve as patterns were failures, or were discarded. It means from the point of view considering flow, they can be disregarded. Remember, at the time, the guys were working on giving us a new way to see the world. Side-trails would have confused the issue, so they often ignored them. Besides, side-trails lead in all directions, and anyway there’s not really a difference between the main trail and a side-trail. It all depends on where you feel like going. If you want to go explore some bright object you see out of the corner of your eye, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing so.

Thank you, Rita. This really does bring some clarity to things.

Whose mouth was it that told me, “the better the question, the better the answer”?

A lot of consequences from that meeting at the hospital elevator, Rita!

And they don’t end – downstream.

I hear that. Thanks, and until later.

8 a.m. That was pretty good. More than pretty good. That rally began clarifying things.

Saturday, December 13, 2014
5:45 p.m. Okay, Rita, how do we get memories of past lives, when we do? The Leininger boy, for instance, remembering his very short life that ended in 1945. What is the mechanism? If a given life is only a strand in our present life, how it that some people can read life after life a person has led?

A thread may be very thick, or I would say, better, may be very solid, very much made more permanent by the living of that life, and so it may be more prominent in its expression; it may also be clearer, more accessible; and it may be a good transmission medium for the predominant lives that shaped it.

I hear – like the successive Dalai Lamas.

Yes, that is a good example, for several reasons. It is transmission by intent. It is foreshadowing by clarity and intent. It is continuity through intent and prior achievement. This is a potential for anyone to begin, if one is wishing to do the work.

Perhaps it would be as well for you to unpack those statements you made.

It is transmission by intent. That is, the continuation of the line of awareness and internal access is a priority during life. A Dalai Lama works at self-development continually, and that work enables the continuity in a way that would not follow if he spent time at racetracks, or stock exchanges, or mundane family life. Nothing in life is achieved without an exchange of effort and attention.

It is foreshadowing by clarity and intent. The dying Dalai Lama hints to his followers where they will find his next incarnation. This he can do because he can look among futures and choose, and because he chooses by weighing what will be desirable.

It is continuity through intent and prior achievement. The perpetuation of the Dalai Lama line through fourteen incarnations is a project, an intergenerational agreement to provide a people with a living symbol. This could not be done if the Dalai Lama spirit (call him) was unable to continue unbroken intent. Even when young Dalai Lamas were killed by power-hungry and treacherous assistants, the intent to preserve the embodiment of the same consciousness was maintained. You will notice that the present incarnation has his doubts as to whether the long experiment/demonstration/gift should continue, because it is not intended to exalt the bearer of the office, but to serve the people, and if that purpose seems permanently lost or altered, there would perhaps be no need to continue.
The Dalai Lama serves as an example, because everyone knows the name, but not because he is the only example of such enterprise; far from it. He is perhaps the best known, the longest known, but other spirits are doing the same thing, silently, unknown, and not to be known.

So there is your answer in brief. People sometimes remember past lives if they have strands sufficiently active that they are manifest, and if it is in their own interest that they be exposed to such evidence. Many experience what you call the resonance, and never suspect it. Some experience it and do suspect it, or define it in one way or another. And for some the clarity approaches normal consciousness.

It feels like I should continue, but no new questions occur to me. Do you have more you want to say now?
Keep pondering. It helps me to come through with concepts. It is a sort of stirring up the river bottom so I can arrange the sand clouds.

Helps you arrange the tea leaves?

That’s a good analogy too. More whenever you are so inclined.

All right; thanks as always.

Sunday, December 14, 2014
6:15 a.m. Miss Rita, our friend Charles Sides emailed me some questions, which I will re-read to stir up your tea leaves, and then hope for answers to one or more of them. As always, I am leaving myself open to the possibility that the questions were planted – in this case by Charles, or upstairs through Charles. And as I phrase that, I see again that it is going to require some mental refashioning if I am to get beyond the language – TGU and all – I have been using for more than twenty years. Not complaining, just noting. I realize that you can’t sail to new places by remaining in sight of the place you started.

[Charles’ email:] Cindi Dale says there are vibrational levels where one rests, reviews, heals, seeks knowledge and then the wisdom to share. These are what she calls the first Five Planes after one dies. Then she describes seven “higher” planes where a “soul” goes about “life” after death. You see, I would be curious to know what Rita experienced. Did she review her life? Did she go back and “relive” any moments experiencing them from the perspective of others involved? Is there time? What does she do? Where is she? What about reincarnation? Is she thinking about it? Who or what comes back?

For the record, I don’t know who Cindi Dale is. Someone Charles is reading or has read, presumably.
Those are two different sets of questions. The first asks theory, the second asks experience. Or rather, that is how the answers would sort out.

Bear in mind that the term “vibrational levels” is a concept formed by taking a higher-dimensional reality and forcing it into sequential 3D experience. It is unavoidable, but it is necessary that you remember that it is analogy. Everything you can be told is a translation. Thus, the spatial analogy sneaks in – as you and I were told in our sessions – and makes it seem as though one would have to go through territory A, B, C, and D to get to E. As you will remember, TMI participants tended to think in the same way about Focus levels, as though Focus 21 could be reached only by traversing levels 10, 12, and 15.

I well remember when I thought that way myself. The numbers seemed to make it obvious. Only with experience did it become clearer that it wasn’t sequential unless you conceptualized it that way.

Bob [Monroe] did try to undercut that assumption by introducing the one-breath technique, but perhaps he didn’t want to rearrange people’s concepts too much, given that what he had given them was so useful for practical exploration.
In any case, Charles quotes this woman as describing these states of acceptance as if they were sequentially laid out, as if they were stops on a railroad line. A better analogy would be short hops by airplane, with the destination depending more on the intent of the pilot than upon a necessary traversing of terrain. Not everybody touches on each of these stops; not everybody touches on them in the same order.

A continuing source of confusion in these matters is the question of who we’re talking about, for this is something as misperceived as focus levels. Are we talking about the personality-essence that was formed in that lifetime and has just emerged into what is to it new life? Or are we talking about the underlying continuity from which the personality was formed? And that will take some examining.

I imagine so. And some definition (and yes, I will bear in mind that all definitions are provisional).
The safest way to go about this is to recapitulate what you yourself were told long ago. It will be new to some, and it will develop into new concepts.

Souls come into existence; or, they have existed since the beginning of time. It depends on how you look at it.
Think about that, for a moment, don’t just breeze past it. New souls exist, or all souls are equally eternal on both ends (that is, they have no beginning as well as no end). Both ways of seeing it more or less true, neither way truer than the other. How can that be?

This seems to me to go well with Peter Novak’s scheme in The Division of Consciousness: people are conscious and unconscious minds, inhabiting the same body, either separating at death or, more rarely, continuing, and this duality caused mankind’s two opinions of the afterlife, reincarnation or judgment followed by heaven or hell. What you see depends on what you focus on. [Rather than conscious and unconscious minds, I should have said spirit and soul, but I won’t go into that, as Peter’s book is not the focus but merely a by-product of the theme.]
The analogy with Peter Novak’s scheme holds in so far as us discussing changing points of view. It does not hold otherwise, given that his starting-point is the individual and mine is the larger community of which the individual is one part. This will become clearer as we progress. The key to this work of perception and analysis is the willingness to hold two contradictory views provisionally – not with the intent of eventually deciding between them, but with the intent of seeing a higher level at which they can be reconciled as partial views each with its own validity. And of course “higher level” – and any other way to say it that you could think of – brings in the spatial analogy. It can’t be helped, only noticed, just as the sequential nature of writing cannot be helped, only kept in mind as an inherent distortion.

We keep coming back to this fact: If you examine a net, it will appear to be one consistent unit when examined at one level, and a series of knots, at another, and even may appear to be a confusion of knots and spaces and strands, when seen at another level. And of course if the net is examined folded over itself, or full of fishes –
Existence is a net. I didn’t say physical existence, for as I said what you call and think of as the non-physical is a part of the one inseparable reality. That net is alive, and the strands and knots are not more or less alive than the spaces, which, after all, are only nothingness when seen from the view that sees strands and knots and cannot see what shares the overall form.

Ether, holding together the heavens. A similar example.

Not so much holding together as comprising, but yes, not a bad analogy. Materialist science looks between planets and sees empty space, or did until recently. The medievals envisioned the planets connected by a matrix they called aether, or the heavens. Invisible to one way of looking, obvious to another. So, similarly, the question of what the world is. Take the knots to be analogous to what you see as individuals. Examine a knot and you see that it is not actually a thing in itself, but an intersection of strands. Or, examine a strand and you will see it as nowhere an independent element, but is inextricably bound to other strands by way of knots, or it could not be part of a net. And, examine the net as a whole (assuming we could envision the whole) and you will see that it is a holder of pattern, that it holds strands and knots in a particular way so as to involve what appears to be space; it binds the three elements that are in fact one element – it all depends on what you examine, how you focus, and what your mental concepts allow you to see.

But of course, like anything else I can say, it is only an analogy. Its use is to remind you and others that concentrating on “the nature of the afterlife” – or “the nature and meaning of life,” for that matter – produce answers geared to the focus you bring to the question. If you remain fixated on the individual – as if a net were only knots, and no strands and patterns and spacing – you are going to get a different picture than if you examine the individual knowing, holding in mind, that this is only one way of seeing a more complex reality.

When you have a microscope and a slide being examined, what you see will depend upon how you focus the lens. What disappears in a given focus does not cease to exist, it only disappears from view. The trick is to refocus, remembering.

This [about alternating focus] is very much what I got in the guys’ epilog to Muddy Tracks.

Should that surprise you?

I don’t know that it does surprise me. I’ve tried to look at things from more than one viewpoint for a long while now. But it has been over an hour, and I’m afraid we must quite before you’ve gotten more than just started – as usual.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Next time.

Monday, December 15, 2014
7:40 a.m., Okay, Rita, I’m ready if you are ready. I will bear in mind that anything you describe can be looked at more than one way, which will mean it may look entirely different without the thing itself changing. I will plug in Charles’ questions.

[Charles had written: “You see, I would be curious to know what Rita experienced. Did she review her life? Did she go back and “relive” any moments experiencing them from the perspective of others involved? Is there time? What does she do? Where is she? What about reincarnation? Is she thinking about it? Who or what comes back?]

These questions, notice, all are from the point of view of Rita the individual. As you say, seen from other points, the same answers will look like contradictions.

I suspect my saying that was planted. Not sure if it was “my” thought, though of course I agree with it. However –
“What Rita experienced.” While still in the body, I was in a coma for the final few days, using my embodiment as a stable reference while I explored options – so, when I dropped the body, I was not disoriented or shocked – I passed over consciously.

Now, listen to that language. I “passed over” – and there is that spatial analogy again. You know, “moving” from the physical to the non-physical. “Moving” across the “veil.” It’s all right to use the language, if you can remember that it is sequential, partial, and metaphorical. I’ll go into the implications of those conditions for receiving undistorted information some other time.

Since I “passed over” consciously, my experience was more than tranquil. It was seamless. One minute I was waiting for my body to release, the next moment it was gone (so to speak), but that transition did not in my case involve a transference of self-identification from one side to the other.
I think you are saying, in your case you were already identifying with your timeless aspects, so you didn’t have to jump from identifying with your time-bound aspect to your timeless aspect. You had already crossed the river Styx, but you remembered.

That’s one way to put it. But let us say merely that I did not need to reorient myself; not about “where” I was; not about who and what I was (am).

So, that is what I experienced. “Did she review her life?” From the viewpoint of a newly conscious, or newly arrived (however you want to put it) soul, it is a life review. But if you are already conscious, you don’t need to do that. Or rather, you don’t experience it that way.

Descriptions of the life-review process are usually sequential, usually from the point of view of the time-and-space-bound soul, so it can come out looking like you read a book or watch a movie or get a course of instruction. A better way to put it would be, merely, that as soon as I was free of the body, I was free of restrictions on my consciousness, and then I knew.

I didn’t have to learn, you see, I knew. I always had known, but the part of me in time and space was somewhat insulated from that knowledge, and with time I will try to describe why – the shorthand reason is that conscious minds in time and space can hold only so much at a time (not speaking of brain capacity, here).
So – see it how you please. No I didn’t go through a life review process in the sense of a tutorial. Yes I received the understanding that would result from a life review process, merely by regaining access. Another thread to follow up on at another time: how we build in meaning as we go along, in the same way and as part of the same process as we shape ourselves by choosing.

Which reminds me that I want to ask about the various versions of various realities and how that fits in.
In time. You have noted the question Remember it another time and it will be a fruitful topic of discussion.
As to reliving moments, the answer is included in the previous answer. Access to these moments is there; a sequential visit or series of visits is not necessary.

Let me clarify that. Someone retuning [to the physical] could easily describe what they had experienced as access to information they had never had, from viewpoints outside their own – as if seeing a movie, or reliving with wider understanding and perception. But I would say, again, those perceptions and understandings were intrinsic to the moment, to the situation, and it is only when viewed from outside time and space sequence that they appear to change. Sometime we should talk about the Akashic record.

I can see I’ll have to start a list of topics of opportunity, and I will do so.

Good. That will let me continue in a straight line even though I know that all these branches would elucidate and clarify.

But in sequential description you can’t go in several directions at once.

Precisely. That’s what “the guys” meant when they said the physical is the needle that determines which part of the non-physical record would be played. That is relative to life in time and space, of course.

So, in your answer to Charles, as you describe your experience would the same experience be described differently by someone who only gradually woke up to the new life?

To the new conditions of life, you mean. Such a one would have different experience depending entirely on who and what he or she was. The higher the level of self-development, the easier and clearer the readjustment. But this is a much more complicated question than you realize, and this doesn’t answer it. Add it to your list.

Charles’ next questions move us off into deeper waters, which is good. With deeper questions – and your riding herd on my answers – we will have a chance of staying focused so that our translation of multi-dimensional reality into 3D terms may make some sense. But be aware, it isn’t ever going to make strict logical sense, because its essence (which does not conform to 3D rules) is always going to have to be intuited by the listener. It is the old story, what can’t be said, can’t be said. It isn’t from lack of willingness or skill but from lack of ability to bring more dimensions into representation in fewer. It can be done, in the way that perspective can seem to represent three dimensions in a drawing of two, but perspective only works if the experiencer has already seen three dimensions. That is, if the viewer can translate the two-dimensional representation back into three – and that can only be done by intuition, not by sensory apparatus.

I think you mean, can only be done by imaginative faculties rather than logical operations.

That will do also. However you look at it, the important thing to remember is the presence – the necessary presence – of translation, and translation could be described as the process of deliberate distortion for the sake of creating a useful analogy.

I think we have time to begin [that next question]. It has been 50 minutes. I am on my eighth [journal] page and I used to be able to get ten before my energy flagged. So – “is there time?”

Is there time. A literal answer would be, “yes,” but what good would that do anybody? So, we’ll go into it, knowing that Charles has a more sophisticated understanding but knowing too that this may be read by others at many different levels of understanding, experience, and theoretical knowledge (that is, reading).

A multi-layered answer:

Time exists, in the sense of a separation of states. But as said previously, time itself as opposed to time intermingled with various vaguely perceived or unperceived or misperceived aspects of higher dimensions, is not the same thing.

Remember and apply if you can – there is no “here” and “there”; “this side” and “the other side.” Reality is whole and undivided. Remembering this will help you fight the mental temptation to create fantasies of life “over there.” Logic and emotion both, but in different forms, will try to build defensible models. If you but remember that “this world” is “that world,” that “this side” is “the other side,” you will see that you are not dealing with two realms with different rules, so much as different perceptions depending on the state of being of the perceiver. As a rule, dropping the body marks a significant shift in perception. Therefore it appears as an all-but-absolute boundary between two realms. If you can remember that it is not two realms but one, things will gradually clarify.

I feel like I am beating this to death, and I’m sure some people will agree, but it is one thing to intellectually assent, and a very different thing to get it. Some time pondering, free-associating, daydreaming about the ramifications if there is only one world, rather than two, will help seat the concept.

We aren’t quite finished with “is there time” but your hour is up and you are getting tired.

And here we are toward the bottom of page ten. As Nero Wolfe would say, “satisfactory.” Thanks, Rita, and I look forward to more.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014
8 am.
[Charles had asked: “Is there time? What does [Rita] do? Where is she? What about reincarnation? Is she thinking about it? Who or what comes back?”]
So, Miss Rita, as we were saying, “is there time?”
Separation of states, rather, as I said. Let me explain.
Well, I should hope so! 
You are familiar with the humorously stated “time is what stops everything from happening at once. There is truth to that, said indirectly which is pretty nearly the only way it can be said. An analogous statement is, “space is what keeps everything from happening in the same place,” which may make it easier for some people to understand the previous statement.
The conditions of 3D life make it easier to intuitively understand the nature of time by comparing it to the nature of space, because space does not include the element of compulsion that time does when experienced in 3D. Unless you are in a vehicle being driven by someone else who is inflexible in sticking to a route you have had no say in determining, you never experience space in the way you always experience time. That is one reason why people who have an experience of life on the other side return reporting that “on the other side there is no time.” It would be a bit more accurate to say, “on the other side there is no compulsion, no compulsory movement of time in a given direction.”
I could feel myself bucking, as I tried to bring that through. I want to know what you mean, but a part of my mind is trying to edit, to be sure the message “makes sense.” So, since I’m not sure if I interfered with the message, I’d going to ask it again, or rather, I’ll merely ask, did anything you meant get distorted in the process?
More than the whole process normally does, you mean”
Very funny. I have never figured out how to express that feeling of amusement from the other side. I used to put in (or hear, or experience) “we smile.”
Nothing wrong with doing that. I suggest that we continue even when you doubt yourself, or when you struggle with an answer, and rely on consistency over time. Just as in any cross-examination, apparent contradictions will either reveal themselves or will be resolved by context. You remember how often “the guys” did that for us. Now the roles are reversed, and it is up to you to object, and up to me to provide feed to explain. I say this mostly for the benefit of those who are beginning to experiment. As you know, at the beginning of the learning process, it would be easy to become discouraged by what seems like self-deception.
To resume: In 3D life there is no compulsion to proceed in one geographical direction, at an invariant pace. Instead, you have freedom to move around, change directions, hurry or lag or stay still. Time in 3D offers you none of these freedoms, and so referring to your experience of spatial movement may be an easy way to hint at the nature of life within time when time does not have the element of silent remorseless compulsion.
Again, remember. There is no “other side” per se. There is one reality, the same reality you partake of when in the body, but perceived differently. It isn’t that the nature of time changes, it is that the way we live in time changes. It is that our experience of time changes.
Suddenly for the first time, I get something I was told a long time ago. The guys told me – us, maybe; I can’t remember when it was – to think of successive moments in time as existing next to one another. They were not only telling us that all moments of time exist; they were saying why!
That’s right. if you could envision moments of time arrayed like any geographical analogy you care to use – city blocks, one leading to the next, say, or trees in a woods – you could see that moving from one street or tree to another doesn’t destroy the one you left, or bring into being the next one you come to. But if something were forcing you along a straight-line route, with no return possible, it would seem like it.
And – this may be important to some – the first step in overcoming the illusion that past time ceases to exist and future time comes into being is to envision the possibility. In our day – your day now, I suppose I should say – it no longer serves to say “on the other side there is no time” because it provides no image or even concept for the busy mind to grasp and gnaw. New explanations for new circumstances, and new times are always providing these new circumstances.
And of course your explanation is shot through with shorthand expressions like “the guys,” “the other side,” and can’t help being so.
Again, to force a picture into fewer dimensions is to either distort it or – with luck and application – invent or employ the equivalent of the technique of perspective.
So – to go back a few paragraphs – separation of states. Envision all moments of time as snapshots, arrayed in the order they were experienced. If that is my world now, it is your world now. In other words, for it to be true where the distortions of physical existence are removed, it must have been true all along, regardless how it was perceived at the time.
Even that last sentence, “at the time,” should make it more obvious that life isn’t the way it is experienced, because if it were, —
Sorry, got tangled.
The difficulty – one difficulty of many! – is that what I am asking you to do contains a contradiction. I say, envision an array of snapshots, yet each “snapshot” is not a snapshot but is itself a movie, or so it has to appear to you in the body (“within time” as they say) because otherwise you can’t get a sense of movement. If life is a series of still photos, how can any of the photos differ? In other words, where does the possibility of movement come in?
Yes, I have felt that question, not quite so clearly.
Zeno the stoic posed it long ago in his conundrum about Achilles being unable to pass the turtle because at any moment in time he is still x amount behind it, even if a diminishing amount.
I never could look at that as any more than playing with words and with logic.
He wasn’t attempting to persuade you that a man can’t catch a turtle, but that the way we perceive time must be faulty.
So how do you resolve that paradox? I can sense time as a series of stills that do not go out of existence. I can’t quite see how – in that analogy or description – anything can change.
The answer is that the pictures don’t change, the observer brings the perception of change by movement over the pictures.
Oh!
Connect a couple of dots, does it?
Can I try? Let’s say that when all-that-is sprang into existence (a puzzle in itself, but we’ll look at that later, I hope) all possibilities exist, as I have often parroted, thinking I understood. Let’s say they exist as an array of cards, each a slightly different situation. The observer/experiencer/person-in-3D chooses to hop from card to card in whatever direction he or she chooses at any given moment – any given subjective moment choosing among objective moments, I guess, which is how we “create our own reality.” It is how we chose what we will become. It is how we can create the mind or soul that can become a strand in another later on – that is, next in line subjectively. This implies different levels of –
Whew, too much to hold.
Yet it was easier for you to put that out without having to ascribe it to me or to any external mind, thus removing one layer of difficulty.
Would you sum it up and/or correct it, then?
The critical insight is the realization that there are two pieces to the puzzle. One is the “objective” situation – the endless array of potential moments, or, to be more careful, the endless array of moments that may potentially be experienced. The other is the “subjective” experiencer. Without the two, it can only be static, not dynamic. It is the ability to choose that creates the unique pattern, and that must be at a different level, or it would be enmeshed in whatever moment.
Take that, Zeno!
Nonetheless, you owe him a debt, or would if his paradox had been the factor that enlightened you to the situation. You haven’t really grasped the nature of it, nor need you. But a certain kind of logic-driven mind may find it a potential exit from the trap of appearances.
Enough for the moment?
It’s always your choice.
Thanks as always.

Thursday, December 18, 2014
7:20 a.m. All right, let’s see where we go today. Miss Rita? I have received a couple more questions to address after we finish with the group Charles sent, but I haven’t gathered them into a list yet, and won’t have time or leisure to do so today. Shall we postpone, or can we continue”
It would be worth your while to find a simple way to chart out what I’m saying so that in one page, or one drawing – in some compact form — you have a précis of the circumstances I describe, so as to help you draw your own connections as you go. If I describe something and you are forgetting that there are not two realms (physical and non-physical) but one which appears to be two, you will be unable to properly fit the new piece into context.
Well, I was thinking, the other day, that we need to figure out some new language to replace “the guys” and all the other shorthand we have used up to now. I’m open to suggestion.
It is a bigger project than you might think, for of course it entirely reorganizes your thinking on the subject. But –
One world, inhabited in common by physical and non-physical alike, because of course any being must inhabit all and not [only] some dimensions of reality.
But inhabiting a dimension is not the same as being aware of it. What seems shadowy or non-existent to one set of awareness will be firm and obvious to another, and vice-versa. The physical world as you experience it – the densest part of reality – is but shadow to those whose awareness centers in more rarified dimensions. Similarly, the non-physical world as I am experiencing it is solid and definite to us, shadowy to you.
The fact that it is one reality, not two, helps explain – or will when you consider it – why those in the physical can “visit” non-physical reality and vice-versa. Have you ever thought that, in a sense, non-physical presences on the denser plane are ghostly – and so are physical presences on the non-physical?
No, it’s getting tangled up in language, as I said.
Just that much is enough to show you the problem and the opportunity. For as long as you can remember “one reality, not two,” you can hear the space between the words. But to the degree that language brings you back to two worlds, the new almost-felt perception slips away.
I was thinking you were going to give me the new language to use. But you want me to devise it.
Not devise it as much as feel it. Because, you are still connected with a physical body holding you in a stable material place; you are still in a mind with certain constraints on the breadth of connection it can hold in physical consciousness at any given time; and you live among others in the same conditions, which makes it far easier to know how and why things will be perceived in a given way.
My turf, for the moment, not yours.
Yes. Because of the links between us, we can communicate. Because of your links there, you can communicate among the embodied – now and anyone who comes across it later.
My sister Margaret and I visited the Fine Arts Museum in Richmond yesterday and in one of the rooms they had Egyptian exhibits. I was trying to feel back so many centuries, and failing. I spend time looking at a mosaic tile from the Romans, maybe 1800 years old, and tried to remember that those stones had been fitted by a living breathing alive-to-the-moment person, and could do it mostly intellectually, very little by any emotional process. The characters in a TV show or movie or novel are almost more real to me than these departed souls. Time is an enormous barrier.
No bigger than space, but you can traverse space. And you can learn to traverse time/space by way of the higher dimensions – what do you think you are doing here? Communicating with me is communicating beyond time-space; it is transcending time-space. And yet it is but little different from communicating with yourself.
Because we are all one.
Yes, all one. The shorthand description is that all the strands ultimately interconnect. It’s just a matter of – well, actually, that is yet another long topic, though a fascinating one. I could never quite see it, in the body; too many concepts to unlearn. But we’ll get to it, only not today.
Anything more to be said about “is there time?” before we move on?
The “more” will emerge in the course of the discussion, for everything changes with each new brush stroke, just as any painting, whether by judgment or words or ways of thinking.
I get that I need to organize your talking-points into compact size before we continue with Charles’ questions and go on to others. Why is that?
Because a reference to continually refer to – a reference that will grow and change as your background and structure change – will color everything new that is said. I can’t give it to you, but it will be a powerful tool, trust that. Your devising it will make it yours in the way that coloring a complicated diagram, or drawing a reproduction of an elaborate network of things, would do. And as you are to be the translator to others, it is well to have it in your mind as yours rather than as something you feel obliged to represent faithfully (which might make you less intuitive and overly logical in your approach).
So I gather that is a hint to any who are following the discussion to do the same for themselves, rather than waiting for me to produce it for them.
Modern technology makes certain ways of proceeding possible that never have been before. So today you can communicate daily, or hourly if you were to choose to do so, and can convey vast amounts of changed and changing materials easily. So, the method of transmitting knowledge and even wisdom has changed. Rather than one person or that person’s scribes writing down an invariant text to be transmitted, today the material can be sent and received piecemeal, and constructed by each recipient on the fly. Thus, instead of you being the wise man coming down from the heavens with the tablets, each person is tasked and is able to open to the wisdom according to his or her own circumstances.
I sent out hints, and encouragements, and it is up to each person what to do with it, how to connect thought to life, how much to accept, how much to modify or reject.
And it never has been any different, it is just faster now.
I predict not everybody will like the idea.
Not everybody will like anything. But these are the conditions for the explorers. Reading a map is not the same thing as occupying or even traversing the territory.
And this way will seem ponderously slow and repetitive as long as people are attempting to absorb the material quickly, judge it, and move on.
Something new – or perhaps I should say the newness within the familiar – is never really understood all at once. It is more a process of ripening with time.
I can see that we don’t have time enough now to proceed on the other questions Charles posed, let alone others. But there’s always tomorrow. At least, until there isn’t.
It is for you as it is for everybody. Nobody is obliged to do tomorrow’s work today any more than they are obliged (or even able) to be elsewhere while being wherever they are. Diligence is the best one can do, and all one need do.
I always got from the I Ching, “righteous persistence brings reward.” I take it as admonition. More tomorrow, I hope. Thanks, Rita.

Saturday, December 20, 2014
7 a.m. Charles asked, “What does she do?” What can you say to that?
[pause]
I gave you a minute to remember how blank you feel about the question, before I try to answer it. You can’t imagine. Not really. You were told [years ago, in a session with “the guys”] “we relate” and accepted it, but it did not really answer anything.
You have to admit, that’s pretty vague.
It is a complicated answer actually brilliantly compacted into two words. The reason it is difficult to explicate is the number of hidden assumptions it needs to respond to. We have started to look at them, but only started. If you try to impose (silently, unaware that you are doing it) 3D qualities to the explanation, you will only get that much more confused. But to remove those unstated assumptions, you have to be aware that they exist. That awareness is the first piece of the puzzle. Nothing can be done without accomplishing it first. Or – it can be done, but the resulting picture will be unnecessarily misleading.
What do I do? Remember what we have to keep in mind: Who is “I”? Not the apparent unit you (and I!) knew in the body, but more like a community of reaction-systems bound by a will that was formed and exercised during the lifetime, which may be said to be the real accomplishment of the lifetime. That is, the components existed separately before the incarnation. It was the controller of the newly assembled bundle that was added, and what was that controller but the will, the ring that bound them? But outside of the very specific 3D conditions of existence, the relationship changes. The various strands, though continuing to be associated, function more autonomously (because not tightly bound by one controlling consciousness in a limiting environment). The extensions in all directions –
Let’s begin that sentence again. While in the body, the community making up the individual functioned more as one individual, isolated from everybody else, than it does outside 3D, where consciousness no longer limits.
Let me try to rephrase that. I think I know what you want to say, and you can correct whatever I get wrong. I think you mean, all the strands always connect to their previous lives (put it that way) whether in body or not, but while in the body, they can function only in the background unless called to consciousness. Once you are outside of time-space, without having to deal with the constrictions of 3D, those strands and their extensions in many directions increase in relative strength – that is, they are more prominent in your new consciousness. [Typing this up, it occurs to me that what I said was only from the point of view of the former individual. Those strands, viewed from other points of view, may seem entirely different.]
That’s all right. Now let me rephrase it, not to correct – for it is a correct statement as far as it goes – but to provide triangulation. “I” being now outside the body, need not exist, as I did in 3D, with a limited intense field of consciousness. Need not, can not. Conditions do not allow it. Instead I inhabit a far wider consciousness, correspondingly less intense except under stimulation from 3D contact or other things which we cannot go into now. Therefore my self-definition is different. “I” am not the same as the Rita you knew, or no, put it this way – I as I experience myself am not the same as I experienced myself in 3D. Therefore I am aware of things I didn’t know in the body, and I react differently. Remember when you were told that what Jung called the unconscious was in many ways a definition of the guys upstairs?
Not specifically. I remember having had the thought.
Well, it would be closer to say his unconscious – be it the personal unconscious or the racial unconscious or other levels we can’t discuss here without going off-track – are more or less the strands that connect us in all directions.
So when you think you are talking to Rita, you are and you aren’t. You are, because everything you know of her is here; you aren’t because the vast bulk of the iceberg that was hidden from you in life – “past-life” connections, etc. – is actively participating.
Can you see why you were told (well, Rita was told, through your voice) that “we relate”? We relate on so many levels –
We relate to all levels of ourselves, and that can stand some explication.
Consider the levels involved. First, of course – or maybe not “of course”; perhaps you never thought of it –
Let’s put it this way. Think in terms of ever-widening spheres of influence. First is the specific bundle of strands that was “assembled” to create Rita. (And by the way I see that we didn’t have the threads and traits description quite right, mingling two different kinds of things. Later we can untangle that.) Those strands, that spent a lifetime functioning as part of a community functioning as a unit, continue to relate to one another as they did, but, as I said, under changed circumstances. They are less constrained, more equal now that there is not the inherent bias provided by a limited field of consciousness.
Meaning only so much could be held in mind at any given time.
Meaning much more than that. But let me briefly finish the sketch of spheres of influence. First, those that were the most active strands in the lifetime; then, those plus the strands that were relatively or entirely inactive during the lifetime. Then, all that plus – gradually, as fast as one can absorb it or as fast as one chooses to absorb it – wider and wider ripples, because of course every strand that had a life connects thereby to other strands with which it is in intimate unbreakable connection. And so on and so forth, for no matter how far you extend the chains, there is more beyond, and who can absorb all the connections available to creation?
Not all those strands were human. Not all were even the kind of animal life as, say, whales. Some lived in other places, for Earth is not the only field.
So, consider what an unending research project, or extended foreign travel, or pen-pal correspondence, it is to be outside of 3D’s constrictions but still aware of what they were.
I knew you were on extended research, which you once told me was your idea of endless fun.
I don’t believe I said “endless fun” in so many words – but it is!
I think that is as much as I can do today, but, a nice start on the subject.
Small bites may ultimately prove more digestible anyway. Don’t forget to compile questions and for that matter compile answers. You will possess new material only to the extent that you chew on it. Merely reading it once will not make it yours.
Thanks, as usual, and I look forward to a continuation.

Sunday, December 21, 2014
5 a.m. Rita, your tutorial is meeting response. Charles is summarizing the points you have made already, and I have begun a file of questions people ask. Whenever we exhaust any one topic, apparently we’ll have more.
So, do we continue on “what does she do?”
We have hardly gotten started on that one. Let’s continue with the first set of definitions to be held in mind – who is the “I” or the “you” being considered? I provided you a hint about our consciousnesses as connectors, able to follow links to other communities of experience (which is how an individual may seem to us). But now let’s return to the part of me that more closely resembles the Rita you knew, the bundle that was born, lived, made connections, developed habits, interacted, thought, studied, daydreamed, did a million practical day-by-day things, and died. We have said that that part of me survives, and I suspect that this is what Charles, for one, expected to hear about.
I think I’m with you so far. You could be considered in your most expanded form – all the network that was used to fashion the nucleus of your Rita-mind and life – or in that Rita aspect considered as if separate.
Not quite “as if” separate. It is separate – only separation isn’t what it seems in 3D. It is a way of looking at things, not an actual barrier. Other than that caveat, though, close enough.
When you consider the unit of consciousness that knew itself as Rita, you are closer to what you used to hear as “in-process Rita,” to be distinguished from “completed Rita.”
I understood that to be a distinction between our consciousness at any given moment – age 35, say – and the over-all view the consciousness attained once it had gotten the complete picture.
Remember, the concepts we were given then – like the concepts I hope to provide now – are not designed as monuments but as bridges. They are to help you move from wherever you are at the beginning to a more sophisticated understanding.
Edging toward understanding A by understanding B, and vice-versa.
Yes. You may find it inspiring or depressing, depending upon your temperament, but there is always more to learn, always redefinition or what you had previously made yours. Always, unless and until you choose stability over growth, at which time learning ceases until you are ready to proceed once again.
And I’m getting the feeling that neither choice is somehow wrong.
Not at all. Eternal life is a marathon, not a sprint, to use one of your analogies. Different people need to take breathers at different times.
So, your previous understandings are to be refined – some of them, to the point that you may feel them being overthrown, rather than refined. But that is the way to new understanding.
I’m not going to worry about it.
No, that’s your strength.
All right, “in-process” versus “completed.” Those concepts were put into place as place-holders, you might say. They allowed us to save the phenomena without having to delve into labyrinthine complexities. But now that your base of understanding has jelled and matured, we can go back and redefine what served.
It is true that every moment – and thus every moment’s mind, consciousness, experience, awareness, state of being, interim status – continues to exist forever. That is what the Akashic Record is. It isn’t the annals of what happened year by year, though it would serve as such. It is, rather, the substance of the life of every moment. You appreciate the distinction? It isn’t merely a record; it is the actual moment. All of them, from every viewpoint (or rather – well, that’s too long a digression. Maybe another time.)
To use another of your analogies. Reality is a CD-ROM, recording all possibilities as it is created. No. Let’s start again, that has too many misleading nuances.
It is a common mistake to think that reality came into being and is created moment by moment. Rather, it came into being and is experienced moment by moment, decision by decision. Your decisions participate in the creation of the version of reality you will live. The unchosen paths exist equally as those chosen, but in the version you experience they aren’t activated, let us say. In effect, they might as well not exist. You see them not, nor experience them and their unchosen consequences.
Nonetheless, they exist, and another path through the same reality, making different choices, will experience a different reality. Different in effect, not intrinsically.
So, people’s past-life reviews show them the life they created by their choices and the effects that followed. It shows, sometimes (depending on the person’s receptivity) the life they might have created by different choices.
And now you will ask, why don’t these people also experience their extended being? The answer is, who are you talking about? If you refer to the extended being from which they were created in the first places, certainly it is no less aware than it has ever been. But if you refer to the specific mind created during that life-experience, it may or may not be aware – it depends upon the level of awareness it attained. And this is not to be taken as a “greater than” or “lesser than” comparison. It is more a matter of the composition of elements, that render the mind more aware, or less, of any particular phase of existence. After all, none of us comprehend the whole. (And I mean to use the word “comprehend” to mean “extend to” as well as “understand.”) There may be no particular advantage in Davy Crockett being a mystic, for example, or, say, Lucretia Mott.
Small side-trail. You tend to think of these laboriously created minds as if their primary purpose were to relate to 3D life. But in a way, it would be more accurate to say that 3D life is created to allow for the formation of such minds which then are available for interaction on “higher planes,” or “the other side,” or “heaven and hell.”
So, to return, if you were to contact a mind in its 3D-orientation (that is, without conscious connection to the rest of itself) you would be told of it experiencing eternal life one way; another, equally 3D-oriented but with that orientation containing an active link to the “non-physical” – such as you, such as myself, such as anyone whose life included that dimension – would report an entirely different experience. The difference is not in the reporting nor in the terrain, of course; it is in the mind doing the experiencing.
Regardless the nature and extent of the mind you contact, the answer to “what are you doing?” is going to be – relating. If I am experiencing my afterlife only from within the mind I created, and that mind has no wider, deeper connections because I did not concern myself with such matters, maybe I will report that I have been to Sunday School at my accustomed church; or perhaps I have been attending classes or teaching class, at my accustomed university; or I am having Sunday dinner with the family I grew up in, or the family I formed. You get the idea. Whatever interested that mind in its 3D lifetime will probably interest it afterward, until it is interested no longer. (Topic for another time: How do people cease to be interested? Clue: They are still connected “upstairs” as you say, and that connection still gives hints.)
And this is not mere putting-in-time. Real, constructive, work is being done by people continuing their living in different circumstances. They were fashioned – to some degree self-fashioned – to do just that, after all. Someone fascinated with mechanics doesn’t have to lose the fascination just because the limited 3D framework has been suddenly (or gradually) experienced as wider and deeper than had been thoughts. There is nothing more (or less) important about metaphysical speculation than about an appreciation of leverage and inertia and the other phenomena of 3D existence. After all, you have Hemingway going fishing in his afterlife, do you not? He knows he is creating, he creates in such a way as to allow a wide range of outcomes, and he continues to experience as if he were still in 3D, only by his choice and according to parameters he sets. And still he continues to function on other levels, as he did in life. (I might almost say, “because he did in life.”)
That’s going to have to do it for this morning, I’m afraid. I always feel like we barely get started and the hour is gone.
Righteous persistence brings reward.
So I’ve heard. Thanks.

At this point it occurred to me that we should proceed more carefully, and I proposed a collaboration to my friend Charles Sides. I have easy access, and years of practice talking to people who are not in the physical, and Rita and I were emotionally close for the last eight years of her life, so clearly I would be right the guy to get the information. But I knew Charles to be the right guy to structure the questions and follow-up questions and to outline the resulting material. He has spent a lifetime formulating the questions and examining the answers that have come out of the East. All that background knowledge would inform his questions, because a lifetime’s research had formed his mind and his way of seeing the world. It seemed to me that together we might be able to do what neither of us could do alone.
I asked him to pose questions one by one, and then either pose other questions, or ask follow-ups, whichever seemed appropriate. He agreed with some enthusiasm, so I decided to begin again in the new year.