46th talk with Rita – 2-21-2015

Saturday February 21, 2015

F: 5:30 a.m. You had said you would continue on from where you left off, and there are a bunch of questions more that Charles posed, that I printed out and have ready to go, Rita. But it is a weird uneasy feeling, doing this, knowing that I don’t quite have a handle on the questions, and hoping you do.

R: You should put it on the record, so that others doing the same work will recognize that their difficulties are not unique to them.

F: Yes, I’ve sort of been doing that right along, and for that reason. Also, it’s a more honest way of proceeding than it would be if I were pretending I could just waltz along, in control of the process.

Many times, I understand the question and could answer it myself (not that I’m always sure where “myself” leaves off and “Rita” comes in). But other times, I read the question, realize that I don’t really understand it, or where it is coming from – and I proceed to put pen to paper and answer it, and all I can hope is that whatever comes out is truly you, or anyway someone “over there,” and not just gibberish. It never has come out as nonsense – that is, it comes out in comprehensible sentences – but often enough all I can do is keep up with the flow and hope it’s making sense. I often do this with the uneasy feeling that a close examination of the material would show that it is full of inconsistencies and contradictions.

R: But you continue to do the work.

F: I do. There’s nothing equally interesting to me, and it feels like I have spent so many years honing my abilities, that I have to proceed on trust that it all adds up to something. And of course when we see response from people indicating that what they read resonates with them, that helps. It’s just that the work always, or mostly, or anyway often enough, comes with that uneasiness attached.

And now we have covered two journal pages and haven’t begun today’s work.

R: Not true. The process, the encouragement of others by example and by stories about your experience of the process, is an inherent part of the process of encouraging people to redefine themselves so that they can move out of their old outgrown shell and into another, larger one.

F: If you say so. All right, you said you wanted to say a couple of things about the final question posed by “cat’s paw.”

[“Is (over-) reliance on thinking linguistically a specific constraint that limits perception on this front?”]

R: Well, as I said, I could have answered, simply, “sometimes it is.” But it will be more useful to explain a little more.

Bob [Monroe] stressed that NVC – non-vocal communication – was an essential skill if people were to communicate with what he thought of as the non-physical world. This is because of just this problem of sequential versus intuitive perception.

F: May I rephrase?

R: You have the pen.

F: I take it to mean, thoughts, words, are sequentially processed and can only be sequentially processed. Non-physical reality is, by definition, outside 3D and therefore is, by definition, not easily even described, let alone experienced, as a sequential 3D-time-slice-limited process. Therefore the habit of communicating in non-3D helps develop the ability to experience non-3D with fewer filters, because it doesn’t involve silently and unconsciously translating everything into 3D terms, which of course is a process that involves a certain distortion.

R: I thought you were worried about not understanding the material.

F: Very funny. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t but what I just said seems clear enough in light of what you’ve said before this.

R: Don’t forget – and this is for everybody, Frank, not just for you – what you get while you are linked to other minds always seems obvious, always seems yours, except when you are groping for new material. It may not seem as obvious when you are processing it on your own afterwards.

In any case, your summary is good enough. Any sequential process is going to impede perception of the non-3D. but it is important to remember that you will only make sense of that experience by integrating it with the rest of your life, and that will be done through 3D means of processing, in other words sequential processing usually involving language. The whole point of 3D existence, as Bob used to stress, is the simultaneous balanced employment of intuition and logic; perception and interpretation.

F: First wallow in the sensation, then use the worm of thought to understand it, he told our Guidelines program.

R: That’s right. And that’s enough on this very important question.

F: Okay, onwards. In order?

R: Why not?

[Charles: {in the 35th session} Rita said, “This should be a tremendously encouraging fact! You aren’t in charge of the agenda; you don’t have to figure out what to do; you aren’t in any way lost; and nothing you became is lost or unemployed. It is a state the very opposite of stagnation.”]

R: I shouldn’t need to say much about this it is only when the 3D-formed ego, thinking it is on its own, unaware of its integral connection to non-3D (through its extension in that direction) and to other past 3D experiences, other 3D-shaped minds (through the strands that comprise it)

F: Sort of lost control of the sentence, though I know where it’s going.

R: The only time you feel lost and alone is when you don’t feel your connection to more than the 3D-defined self that the senses report. As long as you remain in connection – or, and this is important – as long as you live in faith that the connection has not ceased to exist, you don’t have to worry that you don’t know what to do, you don’t know where you’re going to end up, you don’t know if you’re safe, you don’t know if “external” events are going to overwhelm you. If you remain aware of your connections, you recognize that the hardest challenges have meaning, and that it is very true that “all is well, all is always well,” regardless of whether you see it or not, feel it or not, approve of conditions or not, feel adequate to circumstances or not.

You don’t need to do anything, any time, but your best, and in this context “doing your best” refers not primarily to external efforts but to your attitude, your concentration on the underlying point to all of life’s challenges, which is, how do I respond to this? What are my values and how do I express them? How will my response to circumstances show me who and what I am to date?

F: Can’t get lost, can’t get hurt.

R: Well—

You know full well you can get lost, can get hurt, judging in 3D terms. I don’t mean to explain away difficulties any more than to explain away evil or suffering in general. But it is true that from your non-3D perspective you can see that the 3D drama doesn’t mean what it seems to mean from within the drama. Life is meant to be convincing, after all. How much would it accomplish for you to be going through the motions saying, “I know I just broke my arm, but it really doesn’t mean anything”? No, when you break your arm you can’t define your arm into an unbroken state. (The question of miracles is a side-trail at the moment.) It is in non-3D that we experience things that way – instant manifestation, instant change. The point of 3D circumstances is delayed consequences so you don’t have to experience everything as ephemeral. I realize – I well remember – that often enough you would like nothing better, but all that would happen is that you would define away anything you didn’t like or didn’t approve of, and therefore couldn’t profit from the play.

F: Which bears on the topic of why there is so much pain and suffering in the world. It is because we can’t escape the consequences of our actions merely by wishing them away.

R: You wouldn’t accept that if I said it! Try it again, more carefully (which by the way will give you a sense of the difficulty of trying to teach from a distance).

F: Well, pain and suffering are the results of decisions and actions in 3D. Some are our own decisions and actions, and some are not. Therefore we experience results both first-hand and second-hand. Come to think of it, this sounds like the old “Earth school” concept I have so much resistance to. So I suppose that aspect of it must be true, or true enough in context.

R: That’s a little better. 3D experience is always real in the way that anything is real that does not yield to contrary desire. And, as I say, it is the persistence of external conditions that is a prime value in 3D. But it is the fact that such perceived conditions are only relatively true (i.e. true only while in 3D) that is your Ariadne’s thread out of the 3D labyrinth.

F: I guess we aren’t going to get to the next item on the agenda. Anything more to say about this one?

R: You aren’t in charge of the agenda – therefore you can relax about it. You aren’t lost r perplexed at the non-3D level, and if you can learn to trust that – the easiest way to do so being “all is well” – you will find your own way easier not because “external” circumstances ease (they may, they may not) but because you don’t waste so much energy in anxiety.

F: Okay, Rita, thanks and we’ll see you next time.