21st talk with Rita – 1-26-2015

Monday January 26, 2015

F: 6 a.m. Good Morning, Miss Rita. Charles asks a couple of questions that I have more than an inkling of the answers to. Seems to me these are more or less what you were asking in 2001-2002.

[Charles Sides asked:

[1) How is consciousness, which is non-physical, connected to a physical brain? Scientists have demonstrated that when certain parts of the brain are stimulated, images and words and events may appear (memories, I suppose). I have always thought that memories were part of what we physicals call consciousness, as our “awareness” can call them up (pre-Alzheimer’s of course) as part of what we call “thinking.” How can consciousness manipulate the brain to “park” those memories–through a chemical process or something else?

[2) When “Rita” was in 3-D, she spoke and thought in English. She is communicating to us now, through Frank, in English (or does she just stimulate Frank’s language so he writes the words in English)? It’s hard for us in 3-D to imagine anything without use of whatever language we use on this planet, so how does the use of English, French, Swahili, etc., “translate” over to the non-3-D consciousness. Do you “think” and communicate in a language over there, or is there an entirely different way to communicate?]

[However, I misread this as being questions from Charles whereas they were really Bob Friedman’s questions that Charles was passing along, per our agreement.]

F: Care to comment? Or do I have to make up something? 

R: You may make up something, if you wish. The distinction between people “making up something” and “receiving information” is less than people suppose. It isn’t like it is a game of one pitching and another catching. (I omit consideration of situations in which the intent is to deceive; I am talking about any person’s process of idea-reception. Bookmark this topic, if you wish; it would be productive. It is the difference between thinking something through, and following chains of association. It involves the temporary group mind as an active if rarely suspected aspect of a person’s consciousness.)

Now, to these specific questions. The first question I am afraid I have to say, indicates that Charles has not absorbed, or is not taking into consideration, what has been said so far. Either that, or he silently means “in so far as humans are concerned,” but it doesn’t look like this latter is the case. At any rate, here is my attempt to clarify the subject. I will answer the question as posed, and you each may proceed to apply the general answer to human consciousness in particular.

F: I am engaged in a silent argument here, Rita. Doesn’t Charles’ first sentence show that he means humans, or at least humans and anything else that has a brain?

R: Well, let us proceed, and we’ll see. He asks, you see, how consciousness connects to a brain. I understand your thinking he is asking a special case of connection, but I cannot accept the question as posed without seeming to agree silently with several assumptions included equally silently.

F: This reminds me of your asking the guys, in our first session, how many we were speaking to, and their throwing out the assumptions behind the question rather than giving you an answer that would have been approximately true but would have reinforced assumptions you didn’t even know you were incorporating.

R: I have more sympathy now with their predicament then.

F: I’ll bet! So –?

R: Perhaps my objection would become clearer if I were to repeat the question substituting the word “gravity” for “consciousness,” or using “love.” Can you see that this question as posed is as if we had not had yesterday’s discussion? It treats consciousness as a specific rather than a universal precondition of life – indeed of the existence of the world. I will answer the question as posed, but not in such a way as to lose the ground we gained so far.

So let me parse the question. In the first place, it would be truer to say that consciousness is non-physical and physical in nature. It is not bound by physical rules; however, it shapes physical rules. It is not so much found in the physical world as comprises the physical world. It is not a thing or a condition; it is a piece of what the world is made of. That is why, as I said “yesterday,” Bob’s question can’t be answered in the way he would have wanted – scientists cannot examine what they cannot isolate – at least, they can’t understand what they are dealing with as long as they mis-define it.

So, consciousness doesn’t connect to a brain; it comprises it. The brain – and all of physical existence – is made of consciousness. And that was my initial hesitation that you picked up on, Frank. Consciousness has no necessary connection to a brain. Not even within humans, but more broadly not to clouds or soil or radioactive waste or orlon fibers. You tend to think of things having consciousness when it would be more useful to think of them as expressions of consciousness. They are all coordinated – the world is held together – by the fact that one factor holding it together is this undivided consciousness.

F: It is in God that we live and move and have our being, it says somewhere.

R: That is one way to phrase it, and one way to look at it. But it jumps a few levels, let’s put it that way. It is as relatively true as any other way of seeing the connectedness of all things.

Now, there is a difference between consciousness and human awareness, and I realize that this is closer to what Charles means. But again, the question seems to exist without reference to previous answers, which is not good. I mean, it leads nowhere to consider these questions as if in isolation from previous answers. It is in the drawing of connections that a new way of seeing the world will emerge for you. If you do not draw the connection – it cannot be done on your behalf; it requires that you work at it – if you do not draw the connections and feel your way to inferences, this will be not an exploration but, in effect, idle speculation that nowhere touches your real life. For, if you do work to absorb the material and thus change how you see the world, even if you wind up rejecting the new construct, it will have moved you to a new understanding. But first you must have worked with the material. That is your safety-valve, you see; it is less the specific information than the general reorientation that is being presented, and less the reorientation than the temporary or permanent expansion of the ideas that, for you, comprise the world. This can only take place if you work. This is not a science-fiction story to be enjoyed and forgotten.

F: I well remember how your life and mine were transformed by the material we brought forth in our sessions.

R: Yes, and as it turned out, even the things that unsettled me and left me wondering if I knew anything were of great value. In fact I might almost say that was the value. But, to continue.

There is a demonstrable link, of course, between the physical matter of the brain and access to any particular memory. But it is just as was explained to us, the difference between access and location, although actually I need to say more about that, more than “the guys” were unable to get across to us because we were only in the first stages of absorbing their concept of access points.

F: I am going to recommend – in fact, I am doing it now – that people find that part in The Sphere and the Hologram. Maybe I will look it up, and if I can find it I will insert it here.

[And here it is, from material received in Rita’s and my 2001-2002 sessions. Begin transcript:

R: I’ve been wanting to ask the guys about this. We understand that there’s now quite good scientific evidence that our consciousness does not seem to reside in the brain or in the physical body. There’s now interest in the same question with respect to memory. Do you have any comment you’d like to make about that?

TGU: Well it’s all the same thing. You’re looking in matter for things that are not material, and you’re not going to find them. Given that the organizing principle for the whole body is outside of the physical, and the physical is laid down on energy patterns that are set from beyond the physical, it would be foolish for us to then entrust a vital part of the mechanism to a physical place, when it’s already in a nonphysical place.

The circulation of your blood is a physical function. The storing of your memories is not entirely a physical function. The accessing of the memories is more physical than anything else, but the actual storing of them is not. Just as with your consciousness, the accessing of your consciousness is partly physical. If you have a brain injury (even though that’s also an energetic injury), you could look at it as a physical injury that may make it impossible for you to access memories or abilities that you had prior to the injury. But when you drop the body you’ll find that all of those abilities and memories are still there on call, because they weren’t destroyed. They were never in the physical in the first place. Your access to them was destroyed, or damaged, but not the actual abilities or memories. This is why some of you have been surprised that people with extensive head injuries who were given sympathetic and loving attention over long periods of time regained abilities that had been thought to be lost. They learned new pathways to something which was invulnerable because it wasn’t in the physical.

R: All right, can you talk about the process – it’s important to some of us, these days – about losing memories as we age.

TGU: Well again, you aren’t losing the memories, you’re losing the access to the memories. The memories are as they are, as you would find were you to have an operation and have them open your brain and touch portions of the brain with the needles. They’ve done that for years, they know that they are there. But it isn’t that that particular piece of the brain is exactly the memory, it’s more like that particular piece of the brain is the doorkeeper to the memory. A subtle difference, but it is a big one.

R: So something has happened with respect to the antenna that picks up the external information?

TGU: The switching mechanism, we would say. Like a telephone exchange. It could be that portions of the lobes that are the gateways no longer function, and it’s as if the memories are gone. But ordinarily it’s that the switching function is inhibited, and can be restored sometimes, and when the switching function is restored, it’s found that, lo and behold, the memories were there all along. You see, there are two things going on. The switching function on the one hand, that enables you to access the places in the physical gateways, which then access the memories, and on the other hand the gateways themselves.

So if the gateway cell, shall we say, is destroyed, then there may not be any access to memory, although perhaps another one can be developed. Or, if the switching system fails to access the cell that’s perfectly good, still you’ve lost your access. In neither case has the memory been lost absolutely, it’s all there, as you would say, in the Akashic record – which ought to tell you that it’s there in the first place. It hasn’t been so much transferred from the physical as stored, in the first place, in the nonphysical.

[End transcript.]

[Another transcript, which, I notice, uses the word “consciousness” more in the way we use it every day, from a session in the black box in which Rita was acting as monitor while Skip Atwater worked the machinery:

R: Skip has a question here for me to ask. He’s asking, what is the equivalent of the switching system when you leave the body?

TGU: Well, you see, when you leave the body, you don’t need that switching system in just that way, because that switching system is necessary because you’re living in time-slices. You’re going blip, blip, blip, blip, and so there is a sequence. There’s a limitation on your consciousness, which is that it can only hold so many things in consciousness at the same time, and your consciousness really does sort of have to move moment to moment, to stay in the same place. Once you’re outside of the time-slice problem, and once you’re outside of moving, moment to moment, to stay with a sliding present, you don’t have that same situation, and then it’s more like the crystal analogy that we gave you a long time ago, in which we said that the volume of the crystal has innumerable places in it, all of which interconnect. They don’t move, it just depends on which way you shine your flashlight.

Did that answer the question? Your switching system is because your consciousness is required to hold things together while you’re moving from moment to moment in the present. That is to say, while the present is moving around you and you are staying up with it.

[End of transcript from The Sphere and the Hologram; resuming transcript of 1-26-2015:]

R: “The guys” were making an incomplete and only approximately accurate statement, because often – especially with new material – that is the best that can be done. The actual memories reside in what people call the Akashic Record, in that everything that occurs – whether seemingly physical or seemingly mental or seemingly emotional (as if any of those could exist in isolation) – is automatically recorded there. In a sense it could be said to occur there, because that “record” is not separate from life but is life.

However, that last point aside, our brains

F: Wow, that was different! First it was you forming the sentence, then it was me, as I realized when I had written the word “our.”

R: Mark that subject “to be continued.” It is a sign, by the way, that this process is continuing to refine your perceptions. For your comfort, I will continue the sentence. Human brain tissue contains access points that allow us to access the memory, but those access points are more like local copies of the original than like independent replications.

F: I don’t understand that last statement.

R: If you consider the brain tissue that connects to the memory, realize that if it were quite that simple, —

Hmm, this requires a longer discussion than we should begin toward the end of a session. I will resume with that in our next meeting. Meanwhile, let me wrap up other aspects of that first question by saying, again, that consciousness is not a quality, to be included or not included depending on what we’re considering. Consciousness is part of everything.

Note: I did not say everything is a part of consciousness, but consciousness is part of everything, in the same way one might say either “humans ae spiritual in nature” or “spirits have human experiences” and come up with a different meaning.

F: I feel like I muddled that last.

R: You’re tired. Leave it at that, and we’ll come back to the subject.

F: Doesn’t feel like we’ve come very far today.

R: It’s hard for you to judge when you can’t see things as a whole because you are within a life of time-slices. Clearing away misconceptions is valuable work, and implicitly constructive.

F: All right, till next time, and I trust you are enjoying the process.

R: I always loved to teach. Thank you for your effort and attention.