Sunday, May 10, 2015
6 a.m. My friend Jim Szpajcher gave me a book titled To End All Wars, about World War I as Britain experienced it. I sent him one called Hidden History, on the secret history of how that war was generated. In between reading the two, I read de Gaulle’s memoirs of World War II and then a biography called The General, putting his life into context.
It is all so dismal. Then Jim and I exchanged emails about it. What does it all mean, etc.. I said, I’m glad this life is only a dream, but it’s a damn bloody one. It occurred to me, just now – yes, maybe only a dream, but not an individually determined one but a jointly determined one, the result of everyone’s input, just as it seems (but somehow different in meaning) and I thought, well I know who I could ask.
F: So, Miss Rita, what about it? What can you tell us about the nature of reality in this context?
R: The first thing to remember, always, is that there is no one valid view of anything? Your entire life may be described as “to understand A” etc. “You” in this case meaning, everybody in 3D form.
Life is limitation. That is the same as saying, life is viewpoint, life is perspective, life is fractional. All-That-Is may have the complete viewpoint – maybe – or maybe that transcends our reality and hence our ability to understand. Remember (as you so often forget) that non-3D is integrally connected with 3D, which means that our reality is your reality, only experienced without your limitations. Just because we are now without form doesn’t mean we now know everything and it doesn’t mean we live as some higher version of reality. But that there is a higher reality, we cannot doubt. If there is a summary view of our level of reality – let alone of 3D life in particular – it can only be from a higher level. This may not have been self-evident, but surely it is obvious when once heard?
F: Perhaps.
R: Well. We’re back to the old example of the fish in the fishbowl. It isn’t very likely that the fish created both (or either) water and fishbowl. They can only have been created by a higher level of reality (a clumsy way to say it, but perhaps it will serve). Similarly, a view of this level of reality can only be obtained from above it.
I don’t need to persuade you of this, even if I could. I mention it merely to remind you that everything has levels, and we are no closer to knowing everything than you are. If we can live with it, so can you!
F: I’m smiling along with you. So, to continue?
R: That first point is the vital one, as nothing can be learned by those who think that once they have learned something, it is a permanent and perhaps ultimate acquisition. Thinking any given way of seeing things is “the truth” is the end of seeking, until after a while you start seeing fraying around the edges of the fabric.
The second point is a little more philosophical – a little more abstract, or perhaps I should merely say broader.
F: And in writing out the intro to it, I have lost it.
R: Nothing is ever lost, not really.
F: Well, then? So far it has all been prologue, and hasn’t touched the point I reached as I was about to go back to sleep. And, I’m losing that insight.
R: Nothing is ever lost, not really.
Life is but a dream. True enough. Life is real. True enough. You create (or, really, choose) your own reality. To be sure, you do. You are one factor among millions in how reality is chosen. True too. Life has its own inertia, its own momentum, vastly larger than individuals, groups, societies, civilizations. True. Life is manipulated behind the scenes. Always, and from more than merely 3D or even “3D plus non-3D but at this level of reality.”
All these mutually contradictory ways of seeing things are true. Not “somewhat” true, as you’re tempted to put it, but – true.
F: How can so many mutually contradictory things be true?
R: Well, think about it, and you tell me.
F: The only thing I can come up with – or am being fed, maybe – is that we as individuals choose which set of rules we’re going to live under, sort of what Thoreau said in that Walden quote.
R: Not exactly, but that is on the right track. Not that you choose which rules will be true, but which rules will affect you in which proportions.
In all this work, remember not to throw out your day to day experience of life! It’s silly to theorize while forgetting your own first-hand knowledge. What you have experienced may need to be interpreted differently than you did immediately, but still it happened, and it happened to you, so it must have weight. Ideally (but impossibly) anyone trying to make sense of life would take into account all theology, all science, all history and biography, all of everyone’s personal unique unshared experience.
Well, you can’t. All you can do is whatever you can do. But you can – if you choose to, and if you can remember to – remember your limitations. You can remember that you can’t know enough for a final judgment. You in 3D can’t. We in non-3D can’t. Maybe after we graduate to the next level – whatever follows this one – we will, I don’t know.
F: You’re going to seriously disappoint a lot of people hoping for a final answer and, for that matter, the prospect of rest after this life.
R: The short answer to them is, lighten up. It’s all all right. Those seeking rest will find it – but not eternal rest, only until they’re ready to go back to work (or play). In the meantime, life goes on. It always does.
F: Have we wandered from the point?
R: Not really. You wanted to know how life “really” is. That’s the same question you always ask; it is what you started life with and you never quit wondering. But you can’t answer a perplexity sincerely entertained from the same level it is posed at, just as Einstein said in a somewhat different context.
F: And we can’t get beyond this level, so can’t get a good answer.
R: That isn’t true at all. What have I been giving you, but a good answer? But you can’t get a final, comprehensive, once-and-for-all, one size-fits all answer, because at our level it doesn’t exist. Presumably it exists at a higher level, but that is only an assumption.
F: And here you take issue with a hell of a lot of different “channeled” material, to say nothing of theology and science.
R: That is just not so. Or, not entirely so, not absolutely so. Other sources of material are limited too; so are their 3D expounders. Didn’t you hear me remind you that life is limitation? Nothing is ultimate at this level. Nothing. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to learn more about A so you can better understand B so you can re-interpret what you just got about A so that, etc.
F: It has been good to reconnect, but I don’t feel like I even got my tentative insight expressed, let alone explored.
R: I merely saved you from a long exploration of a logical conundrum that can’t bring you anywhere but what I did say, which is that it is a matter of viewpoint. So, I answer your desire beyond your question, your continued wish to better understand the sea in which you swim.
F: Or drown.
R: That’s melodramatic, given that drowning is only one more doorway to the next thing on your journey. Those who drown, overwhelmed by life, do not live the less thereafter. It’s just another form of the universal doorway. It’s a distorting shame, by the way, that biographies are constrained to end at death, as if that were what it appears. It is true that, relative to the external manifestations of the life, death puts period. But internally, it’s another story, and which do you think individuals hope for (and, often despite themselves, know is true), limitation or eternal living? This by the way is why biographies such as Adomnan’s of [his predecessor as abbot of Iona, Saint] Columba so little resemble modern biography – they are tracing different things, and therefore concentrate on what is essential to their purpose, which things are not the same as those investigated from the assumption that a given soul is born, lives and then dies, the end.
And this is enough for now.
F: Okay, Rita, thanks. Not what I expected or even hoped for, but not a disappointment either. Till next time.
Before I read what you posted today I was going to ask you for your opinion of a definition I read in a book by Elisa Medhus called My Son and the Afterlife. The mother talks to her son through a medium and asks very insistently who or what we are. He says: “We’re part of a big field of energy — of consciousness made of energy.
We’re individual segments of that consciousness, but we’re also the whole — kind of like a hologram — which can be both the whole and parts of the whole at the same time. In the simplest of sentences, we are sentient energy.” She then says: I’ve heard someone describe us as consciousness moving through various perspectives experiencing ourselves.” and he says: “Damn! Who wrote that?”
The mother: “I don’t remember.”
Him: “Yeah, Mom, that’s who we are. That pretty much nailed it.”
I immediately thought of you and what you thought of that definition. Moving through various perspectives – that sounds about right, doesn’t it? 🙂
“Perspectives” is a bit like what you said about rules (Thoreau) that Rita adjusted to be how we react to rules or choose to be affected by them.
She was tough on you today, but you were no less on her, almost scolding her for maybe disappointing us 🙂
it’s interesting how people perceive things. She wasn’t hard on me, nor i on her. That wasn’t the energy at all. It is, perhaps, what interaction looks like when emotions are projected into it. Between us there was no such abrasion. (You aren’t the first to make this assumption, BTW, so i knew it was worth clearing up, though i doubt people will quite believe me.)
I have that book. It seems to describe the oversoul, (entity), and the human experience in form, (contains the whole. I wonder if Rita could talk more about the oversoul, and her experience of it?
Frank, as always, thank you for these dialogues.
You’re welcome. And as to your question, we can ask.
Dear Frank,
Re. subjectivityperceptions etc – I cannot imagine anywhere on the planet there are two women swapping books on war history….? No wonder you were in ‘melodramatic’ mode!
Re. Dreaming the 3D universe – I felt I had stepped on a stair that wasnt there when I read that – I can only understand it as a metaphor – ? Quantum physics tells us solidity is an illusion, the atoms of matter are composed of ‘space’ humming with electric vibrations, but I ‘dream’ the hurt and the bruise when I bang my shin.
Just two pebbles from the mountain of comments, questions, and above all apprecration inspired by your and Rita’s conversations – blessings everyone.
It is a mistake to think we can improve on things just by ignoring them. The wars were huge events, and the men — and women — who helped fight them or survive them or recuperate from them added their bit to the human experience, which is the same as saying the non-3D library. Concentrating on reading about those experiences is not necessarily melodrama, any more than it is necessarily sadistic or masochistic or escapist or any other possible cause-and-reaction.
As to dreaming the 3D universe, no, no metaphor. The science that is so widely assumed to know what it is talking about is the metaphor — only few scientists realize it.
Thank you very much Fellow Travelers (smiling).
Frank? I could not but laugh of the book change about “the War.” I`ll make a confession here and now, as The Female of me to be in this lifetime around (at least so it seems, hee, hee). From the age of 11 years old began to study seriously TWO BIG Volumes written by Winston Churchill about WWI, the post-war years, and the following up to WWII…and the interest of history when it comes to wars (trying to understand the cause&effect of WHY it happened) and the interest of history have continued as far as it goes.
I cannot recall to have had any girlfriends who were interested in the same”hobby” back then (as a teenager), that`s for sure (laughs).
And once to have had the love for the old western-movies in the early childhood/the teenage-years, likewise, but only with the movies starring John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Stewart Granger etc. etc. (without them wasn’t interested). AND the old musicals such as “Oklahoma”,”Annie Get Your Gun”,”Singing in The Rain”, “Top Hat”, “Cabaret”, “The Show-Boat”, Porgy&Bess, etc. etc. AND yes, not to mention my own favorite musical:”Anything Goes”….
Rita:…and it is connected at every level between physical and non-physical.
The nature of time doesn`t change, the Experience of time does.
Further Rita says:…and since different versions of yourself experience different lives because of different choices, we in non-3D (so to speak) get to see all the potential, not any one version alone.
And then every Choice (the consequences of choices)…make “a ripple-effect.” Not just locally but all over the world.
B&B,Inger Lise.