Rita — two ways to see the world

Monday March 9, 2015

F: (2:30 a.m. EDT) So, Miss Rita, we have another question queued up, but I think I want to ask you something instead. And, just as when you and I used to be talking with “the guys,” I can’t help wondering how much is my idea and how much is planted. But since there is never any way to know, I gave up trying to figure it out, long ago.

Here’s my question. You have sketched an understanding of the world that makes a great deal of sense. It feels right. It isn’t all woo-woo and it isn’t reductionist either. It seems to accommodate reincarnationist views without being limited to the traditional reincarnation scheme. All well and good, and it is well and good. But what about the development of the individual over lifetimes?

I’m not doing very well at phrasing my question. It amounts to this: I can see us as composed of strands each of which are entire lives lived elsewhen and yet simultaneously still alive and interacting. I can see the result being a progressive complexification of the non-3D dimensions in a way that would not have been possible outside the specific conditions which 3D was constructed to provide. I can see the point of existence being not these seemingly separate and finite 3D lives, but our on-going interactions which have been described somewhat vaguely as eternal life. But how does all this fit in with reports of people dying, judging their past life, and moving on to another one? How does it square with people developing over time, I mean? And what is the human part of the overall scheme of things, as seen from the human view?

I hope this is clear to you intuitively; I don’t think I’ve really gotten words around it.

R: You may remember my telling you of the old days when Martin [Rita’s husband] and I were running the lab for Bob [Monroe] and many of us would meet on Sunday mornings. Sometimes Martin or I would say, “We really got an exciting session, this time,” and we would play the tape of somebody’s booth session – and not only was there no excitement, it was even boring, many times. That was because there is a quality of sharing in the moment that cannot be recaptured automatically by recording the sound, or even the sound and picture, of what is going on. The circumstances are too different, and all you get is the spoken word, not the spoken word while connected in the temporary joint mind. Sometimes words and tone of voice, etc., can convey emotion, as in the Patrick tape, for instance, but still it is a separate “performance,” if you will, and no longer a joint experience.

F: When you began that paragraph I took it that you were going to talk about the fact that readers would get my meaning between the lines regardless of how well or badly I did at summarizing things, but now I see you are going somewhere else with it.

R: That meaning is there as well; however you have to expect considerable slippage, because people exerting their understanding on mental material may come to different conclusions depending on their unstated or unrealized beginning premises. Bit I brought up our experiences of connection / disconnection as the beginning of an analogy between the world as seen from connection – which is what I have been sketching – and as seen from disconnection, which we can now proceed to examine for the sake of completeness, in order to restore the proportion, let us say.

Take Rita as an example. We could take you, Frank, but you are in mid-stream. We could take others – Emerson, say, or anyone well enough known – but our view of them must be relatively external. So take Rita.

Rita is born of specific parents in a specific time and place. She is born the result of many non-3D choices, but she is not aware of it. The strands within her may pull her this way or that, but she does not necessarily experience herself as a community, merely as an individual with different moods and different priorities that may change over time. The heredity that she is aware of is physical – her DNA, her “inherited traits,” her family resemblance. In this context, you understand, even mental and spiritual tendencies may be experienced and understood as physical heredity, in the same way as the non-3D is seen to be part of 3D and vice versa.

But the heredity she is not aware of is the web of connection we have been sketching in these past few weeks. If she becomes aware of “past lives” it is from the starting-point of her life at that moment.

F: Another inevitable distortion caused by the limitations of consciousness in 3D conditions.

R: That’s right. Now, can you see the application to your question? Life when seen from within connection – when you are functioning in awareness of your non-3D components – is quite a bit different as you experience it from life seen as though you were on your own. That’s all the difference in schemes represents, a difference in viewpoint between a connected view and a disconnected view. This is why people talk about “enlightenment.” Once you experience and understand and incorporate the shift in perspective, everything looks different because, effectively, you are different.

So all the discrepancies in ways of seeing the world will shake out differently if you will get into the habit of analyzing them as either in connection or not in connection. Either in the moment, functioning as part of a temporary joint mind, or listening to a recording of something that had been alive and present but is now (the way you are experiencing it) fixed, static, and exterior.

F: That’s very interesting, and a graphic analogy. You really must have been a good teacher. I knew how much your students loved you, but of course I had had no experience of your setting forth an understanding of things so that I could grow into it. All I saw was the skill and value of your questions to the guys.

R: You should take some time to mull this new way of dividing experiences, so I will say no more about it at this time. And after we deal with this next question, perhaps it is as well to take a break for a few weeks, or a few days – depending on many things – so that Charles may absorb what has been given and may plan out the best way to present it.

F: I remember when Joe Smallwood told me he was going to go away for a while, after our initial ten days in 2005, and I was sad to see it end. Well, it didn’t end, but transformed, and transformed into something wonderful, most of which I never got around to publishing, though maybe someday I will be able to. Anyway, I doubt that you and I are finished with each other, Rita, so, we’ll just see what comes next.

[Jim Austin’s question, somewhat edited:

[“In The Sphere and the Hologram, `Between Lives,’ TGU say `If you have developed yourself to the point that you can hold your mental clarity and your mental focus without a body, then it becomes a matter of choice whether you come back or not.’ I was about to ask Rita how do I `develop’ myself, but it all came together for me when she said, `Your clarity of perception increases not as your character changes in one way or another, but as your continued focused intent manifests to assist you to crystallize an attitude. In effect, rather than your being led now by this strand, now by that one, all the alternations take place within an overall orientation that maintains an internal set of priorities. Your manifesting being is not as subject to flux as previously, hence it is easier for you to persevere.’

[“I suspect this may be as close to ‘method’ as we’re going to get here. Any number of practices can help quiet and focus the mind/attention/intent. I’m pretty sure they help one down that path of ‘quieting’ 3D and becoming more conscious of connection to our non-3D self (thus more open to ‘guidance’), leading (eventually) to that crystallization. My Zen practice works for me right now; the trick seems to be for each to find the practice that works for them. Wonder if Rita would care to critique and/or say more on any of the above?”]

R: No need, you have understood it. As I said a few minutes ago here, Enlightenment is merely a matter of experiencing and comprehending on-going connection. Once you redefine yourself as part of all that is in a real and everyday way, neither the world nor you yourself will look the same. You will not function the same nor will it seem to you that you are constrained in the same way you thought you were.

This is not a matter of concepts, for a person may have a transformative experience and be unable to put it into logic or concept – unable and not needing to. Or, a person may have the concept as an abstract possibility and fail to make it real (that is, it may remain only a concept, rather than a transformative experience).

F: I am put in mind of Thoreau, saying that he learned from his Walden experience that you can make certain changes and discover that your life is lived in new conditions, with fewer restrictions. I can’t quote the passage, though it is a favorite of mine, but it didn’t refer merely to physical conditions but to the nature of the internal reality one lives as one changes.

[I looked it up after the session: It is from the Conclusion of Walden: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unimagined in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”]

Well, our hour is up. Thanks as always, Rita, and I’ll talk to you again whenever it happens, whether tomorrow or whenever.