What can we do to come to awareness?

Monday, May 18, 2015

F: 5:45 a.m. Bob [Friedman] asks a good question.

[Bob: This session prompts a question. Anyone who has read this material or other books by Frank knows about the strands of connection. Some of these strands are “past lives,” as mentioned today. But how does the “normal” human, enmeshed in his or her illusion of individuality, and in the day-to-day living of their lives, connect with these other strands without spending, as Frank did, many years working on that connection? What is the how-to here, what is Rita’s advice on how the everyday reader of this book can make that connection in their spare time? Just about everyone says “meditate,” yet there are people who meditate for decades without that connection (or at least it goes unsuspected by the conscious mind). Does Rita have a different take on the method to connect? I suppose that the subtle connection is already there, as in the earlier unsuspected influences of David, Joseph, etc., on the “present-day” Frank (until he became aware of them). Is there a way for the average Joe or Jane to become aware of those connections without spending years in a Tibetan monastery? Sorry, too many questions. Just use whatever works for the book, or not.]

F: It sounds like many but really it is just one – how does one connect or make the existing connection effective?

R: Let’s answer the question as asked. How does the average person connect with their comprising strands “in their spare time”?

The short answer is, they don’t. And they don’t do it by spending years in a monastery, either, nor by meditating.

F: Okay, I get where you are going with this but it would be better for you to say it than for me to.

R: It wouldn’t come as easily to you as you think. You do have the general idea, but if you were to try to put it into words, you would find it quite elusive, I think.

F: I expect it’s one of those deals where, 15 minutes and a couple of pages from now, it will be quite obvious.

R: Let’s find out. Maybe we can do it in one minute and one sentence. It depends upon the receiver no less than upon the sender; it is a connection, communication, not a transmission, else communication would be easy, reliable, dependable, formulaic. Any teacher knows that every student is different. We teach toward the average but only because that gets us into range of as many as possible. It is always up to the teacher to extend and the student to extend – but the spark jumps, if it does jump, one person at a time, even if 50 people experience the spark jumping at the same time.

F: Yes, I get that, although I imagine the group mind helps each one to be in the place to have the spark jump.

R: Yes. Words are tricky, as you know. The same phenomenon will seem quite different, considered in other words. But the reality is never contradictory, only aspects of it are.

So here is my one-sentence attempt to help the spark jump the gap: What makes you (anyone) think an effort is required to connect with your comprising strands?

A second sentence: What makes you think any effort from the compound-being end of the continuum would suffice, or even assist?

A third: Have you ever heard of the concept of Divine Grace?

F: This is all clear enough to me.

R: And to some others, but for you, and for others, now comes the filling-in stage, where the complications enter. But it would help for you to state your understanding of the reality I just, somewhat cryptically, attempted to convey.

F: I don’t think it is that hard. And once again I am reminded of the help we could get from theological investigations over the centuries. A state of Grace is one thing, and I’ not even very sure of what is meant. But Divine Grace as an active element in life is unearned. It comes to us, we don’t take it or earn it. And that’s a very interesting key, here. (I almost said “clue,” and maybe I should have.)

Bob’s question assumes there is something we can do, even need to do, from the 3D end of things. If I get your meaning, you are saying it is not up to us and we can’t do it even if we want to. The best we can do – and all we need to do – is to be receptive to it.

R: What is your concept of resonance, if not an awareness of that fact? “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” That’s what it means. But by what effort can you (anyone) come to know the truth? You don’t so much find it or figure it out – though for some that process can enter into it – as recognize it. You may do so on hearing it, or by living it, or just out of the blue (as your inner connections make the jump and the knowing transfers closer to your consciousness until it breaks through) – but what you can’t do is dictate when or how you will get it.

F: This illuminates so much! I wish I had the theological arguments in my mind. I’m going to have to get all this to Jim Marion. I think he’ll see it. [Jim Marion, a former Catholic priest, authored Putting on the Mind of Christ, a psychological analysis of stages of mental and spiritual growth based on the work of Ken Wilbur.]

We can resist but we cannot force. We can be open to receive, but we cannot accomplish by any given effort. That’s a whole line of theology, even though the assumptions of reality that the theology were based on are quite different.

R: That is why I began – the guys began – by redefining who we are and what reality is. The reason the theological arguments do not illuminate today is because there was no connecting-point between the inner world of the theologians and the inner world of those living today. But a moment’s thought (how often do I wind up saying this!) should have made it clear that no extensive body of thought can be irrelevant to the whole. To throw away theology may be necessary in order to reshape a society’s mental world, thus shaking up what is or isn’t possible, but that is not the same thing as saying that what was discarded was of no value. Think what Jung derived from his study of alchemy, or astrology.

F: This session – I think it is the 100th – is a natural wrap-up to the introduction to life, isn’t it?

R: It can be; that is always a choice, because reality has no seams or divisions except provisionally. But yes, this final concept does round it out. It isn’t a matter of your having to work to get the concept; it will resonate or not, partly but only partly depending upon your being open to it. Being open to it would not be enough considered abstractly, but in practice only those who are ready will be open to it. To others it will seem nonsense or mere speculation.

F: One theological school said Divine Grace was sufficient. Another insisted on the necessity of Good Works, if I remember rightly. I don’t remember the specifics – it was the basis for a lot of Protestant divisions in the 1600s and thereabouts, I think. In fact, also earlier, and later.

R: Do you begin to see why Hilaire Belloc defined Protestantism as heresy rather than as another religion?

F: Protestantism and Islam. I have the book [The Great Heresies], I haven’t read it. My guess would be simply that he saw Protestant sects as splitting off one by one on some logical division, rather than holding the tension of opposites within itself as the Catholic establishment did. But it seems to me that any religion may be seen as doing that.

R: Yes. You could say that any given religion, though useful to some, is in effect a heresy from the great reality, to the extent that it considers itself an exclusive truth or bearer of truth rather than as one source of light among infinite sources. And of course it is natural for each one, in so far as it expresses a clear understanding of one aspect of reality, to consider itself enlightened and enlightening, and others as wrong to whatever extent they contradict it.

F: True of the religion of Scientism, and of materialism, of course.

R: No need to call the roll. No one and no way of seeing is the exclusive way to the truth, and for that matter, not every understanding of the truth may be clearly expressed or even clearly understood. The former statement is more obvious to people than is the latter.

So the answer to Bob’s very apposite question is – you’ve been given the word, yet again, new wine in new wineskins, and what you do with it is up to you. What I advise you not to do with it is set up a new religion! A much better use of your time would be to re-examine what you know, what you have lived, what you have at the periphery of your consciousness, and bring it forth to continue to transform your lives in reaction to – in interaction with – the revolution in your thinking sparked by this material.

F: Not quite Faith and Good Works.

R: Not quite salvation or damnation, either.

F: True. Well, I don’t know what others will say to all this, Rita, but I for one find it has clarified my thinking. Thank you for your end of the effort. May I take it that there is more to come?

R: There could be. There is always more to be said and the additional material does not interfere with the first.

F: Thoreau, rough paraphrase.

R: And he was right then and is right still.

F: So he is. Thanks again, from everybody who has been affected or is yet to be affected.

R: In short, as stated, the whole world. (For who does your definition leave out?)

F: Smiling. Bye for now.