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.”]
F: Well, our hour is up. Thanks as always, Rita, and I’ll talk to you again whenever it happens, whether tomorrow or whenever.
Thanks a lot Rita&Frank,and the comments by Jim.
What is said within this session makes sense all the way. It “feels”right.
I`m just coming home from a journey “back in time”… one way or the other the holidays spent up in the hills and my sister’s cabin became “the museum of time” experience.
In fact, I have done a journal out of the holidays… and from “somewhere” got hints of what the holidays were all about, more or less “a travel in nostalgia.”
Peculiarly enough, when i bought the new journal for the holidays, and began to write the headline at the first page (about the first day of the travel) — somebody, or someone, as “a voice in the mind, “told me to write as the headline: “A state of mind” (a Mindset). The holidays were all spent in traveling “the old pathways.”
BUT,is it not what all of us do when we become older? I can recall how the elders always could recall every detail from their own past more than their recent years!
All of us longing back to the happy days as youngsters (those of us who have experienced “the innocent happy days” that is)… or, do we only keep the remembrances of the “happy days”?
(the bad days as forgotten at large?)
Okay, now I have a lot in keeping up with after coming home.BUT (it is always “a but”), I have got “a feeling” of sorrow attached with me all the way home (a ghost?)… something felt as “gone and lost” forever… because next year my sister’s cabin and their house shall be for sale, as my sister & husband have decided to move into a condo.vAnd they have absolutely no hesitation in doing it at all after to having built and lived in both their own house and cabin for 30 years. They are looking forward to move, it is impressive!
WHY am I to feel sorry? I should have felt joyful and happy? Especially after all to have learned by now(and experienced)!
B&B,Inger Lise.
Bliss&Blessings for everything.
Welcome back! I have missed your comments.
A couple of things. You say, ” do we only keep the remembrances of the “happy days”? (the bad days as forgotten at large?)” I don’t think so. I think, more likely the opposite. We can be scarred for our whole lifetime by things that happen when we are so young and defenseless. But maybe we remember how we were, rather than what happened to us. Wordsworth, you know, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, 60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended; 75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
You ask yourself, “WHY am I to feel sorry? I should have felt…” But another part of you knows that this is a waste of time. We feel what we feel, not what we “should have felt.” So, meditate on it, live it as you do your chores and go through your day. “Regardless what i would have thought I’d feel, I felt this, instead. Why? Waht am i getting into touch with?”
Thank you very much Frank, and the lovely/beautiful poem by Wordsworth.
Hmm,”the way we(once upon a time) were” reminds me of the movie starring Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford with the very same title “The way we were.”
BUT actually the husband and I stayed overnight the very first Day of our travel at a historical old Hotel built in 1894. The Hotel is precisely of the same outlook both inside and outside as back then.
I did not knew the Hotel have a ghost attached to it beforehand,or else to have found another Hotel(laughs).
And here comes the story about the Ghost:
The headline:”Eternal Guests?”
There are also some who maintain that the hotel has its own ghost to this very day,the ghost of Miss Greenfield. Miss Greenfield was a hotel guest during the end of the 19th century who allegedly gave birth to a child in room 17(the husband and I slept in room 9 at the hotel)without anyone noticing and then promptly returned home to England.
The body of her deceased child was later discovered inside her locked hotel room,and she was put on trial in England.
Miss Greenfield tragically took her own life before the trial could begin,and it is therefore still a mystery today if she herself killed the child or it was a stillborn. Legend has it that Miss Greenfield still roams up and down the halls at DALEN Hotel in Telemark(a county in Norway),and especially guests staying in room 17 can feel her presence.Perhaps not surprisingly,it is also suggested that you do not place anything in the cradle in “her room.”
Well,well,even in our room no.9, it was freezing COLD—my husband could not believe in me telling him of how chilly the bedroom felt in to be—I put every blankets to find in the closet, to use in the bed, and even took my warm sweater and socks on in the bed—hardly managed to sleep through the night at all(and BEFORE to have heard about “the ghost-story”).The next morning at the breakfast-table could read about the Legend of Miss Greenfield.
…..or else the particular Hotel have had many Royalties from Europe visiting back in time.They were fishing in the rivers and did the hunting of Moose back then.
If you or someone else are interested in to have a look in how the Hotel DALEN in Telemark,Norway, looking alike is it a web address:
http://www.dalenhotel.no
Heartily,Inger Lise.
P.S.
Frank? Please,do you know an author by the name Ronald Russell? He have written a book titled:”The Journey of Robert Monroe”(foreword by Charles T.Tart).
At the front page is it told Ronald Russell also have written “The Vast Enquiring Soul.”
…or else I am pondering about what you have said in your last sentence:”Why? What am I getting into touch with”?
I have not figured it out as yet….but have some suspicions.
Ronald “Russ” Russell and his wife Jill were long-time friends of Bob and Nancy Monroe, and of Rita and Martin Warren, and indeed the whole New Land community, over decades. Russ became a friend of mine via the New Land community, and when he wrote The Journey of Robert A. Monroe, Hampton Roads published it, and guess who edited the book? Not that it needed much editing: Russ was a very skilled and experienced writer, and an academic before that. Yes, he wrote The Vast Enquiring Soul for Hampton Roads, and prior to that, edited Using the Whole Brain and Focusing the Whole Brain, both about practical uses people have found for Monroe’s Hemi-Sync technology. In fact, Using the Whole Brain was the first Monroe-related book i edited and published while at Hampton Roads, back in 1993. They are all out of print, but no doubt could be acquired, used, via amazon.
Russ is now in his 90s, living in Scotland. If you have a message for him, I would be glad to pass it along.
Thank you very much for telling (indeed)! Frank,
I`m ever amazed how one’s research leads to another approach (into the next step).
I have had the one book by Ronald Russel in my bookcases for a long time but have not had the time to read the book properly before now.
And yes, Ronald Russel is absolutely a skilled writer! The book is for everyone to understand and not just “the academics”.
Something told in the book caught my mind: “Consciousness extends beyond the individual. The strength of consciousness in an individual fluctuates from moment to moment and is regulated by focus of attention. Some states of consciousness have higher focus than others. A group of individuals can be said to have group consciousness, which strengthens when the group`s attention is focused on a common object or event.” (Page 348 in “The Journey of Robert Monroe”).
Russell also quote Goswami`s material Goswami writes,”because we are so enamoured of experience, of our melodramas, of our attempts to predict and control, to understand and manipulate everything rationally. In our efforts we miss the simple thing– the simple truth that it is all God, which is the mystic`s way of saying that it is all consciousness.”
Further he says: “Consciousness is prior and unconditioned. It is all there is. There is nothing but God. But consciousness is not a phenomenon: instead all else are phenomena in consciousness.”
…or else Scotland is a neighbour to Norway as you know (Galloway? Is it not in the Hebrides?).I did not knew R.R. lived THAT close.I was traveling the Hebrides by ship in the last summer.
Please give my best regards to him from me (and tell him book made it all clear to me at at last, after all these years of study) when you are in contact with him the next time (if you please).
Sometimes I am feeling overwhelmed!!!
I still have much catching up to do with Rita`s. Each time I have the feeling– me, sitting in “the parked car”– Rita or”somebody”, giving me “a kick” to do something else (laughs).
Okay, now catching up with the housework again… or, to skip the whole thing as it is the NICE summer days outdoors!
Thanks a whole lot again Frank (cannot let be thanking you &all), all the time,
you&Rita& all are my”Lifeline”.
My life is much richer by it.
Always,
Inger Lise.
Galloway is not in the Hebrides, but in southern Scotland near the English border. Still pretty close, at least it was too close when those Vikings were making so much trouble! 🙂
I am in the process of retrieving Russ Russell’s email address, and will send him this correspondence. I expect he will be interested.