After we die…

Poking through some old files, I found this description of a consultation with The Guys Upstairs, the last I ever did for my friend Ed Carter. Ed made more use of TGU than anyone but myself, perhaps because he knew I was always delighted to “go Upstairs” and talk to them. At the end of November, 1996, he sent me, by e-mail, this question to ask:
EC: “Both my earth brain and my eternal mind accept as a fact that C 1 existence requires three spacial dimensions plus the dimension of time. While my brain does not comprehend it, my mind can accept as reality the assertion that I also exist in the totality of all mind states, however many that may be.
“The question: When I die and discard the earth body I chose to occupy during my C 1 life, do I then only exist as `the collection of mind states’, or do I also exist as some kind of C 1 image, and if so how does this work?
“Note: I am painfully aware that I do not have the words to express what I am trying to convey, but I expect you know what it is.”

Ed’s question about `the collection of mind states’ stems back to something they had told us previously. During the time Ed and I shared an apartment, he came for a visit while I had a wracking, painful cough that had gone on for two weeks. It wasn’t asthma, and it wasn’t a cold, either. I didn’t know what had caused it. It didn’t get better or worse, and it didn’t go away.
One night I offered to talk to TGU for Ed, so I lay on the couch in the living room and he worked the tape recorder, and filled a side of tape with their answers to his questions. As I got up, at the end of the tape, to go to the bathroom, Ed asked if there was anything I wanted him to ask them on my behalf. (In those days I found it easier if others posed the questions for me, so that I didn’t have to alternate between reception and transmission, so to speak.) I said, “Ask them how come the entire time I’m talking to them, I’m not coughing, and as soon as I get up I’m coughing again.” Before I got to the bathroom door, I knew the answer, but when we started again Ed asked the question and I got a fuller description of their version of what was going on.
TGU said that our physical health is actually a relationship between our various bodies (physical, emotional, mental, astral) and our innumerable mental states, and that our health may be affected by changing either end of the body-mind polarity. Changes to the bodies tend to persist but are harder to bring about. Changes in mental state are evanescent but are, therefore, quite easy to bring about.
When I was “where” I go mentally when I talk to TGU, the specific mind-body combination that had resulted in my coughing was in abeyance; one end of the polarity had moved. When I returned to normal consciousness, I moved back where I had been, and the coughing resumed. They said this explains why people with multiple-personality disorder may have one personality who is diabetic and another who is not. In each case, the body is the same, obviously; but the mind-body equation, so to speak, is not.
Sure enough, as soon as I ended the session, I started coughing again. But this time, I reached for the state I had been in when talking to them, a calmer, more expanded state. I brought the coughing to a stop. It began again the next day, but I again stopped it, and it has not recurred. After that, Ed and I took their explanation as a given, and I think that it was owing to this experience that he asked whether he would continue to exist only as “a collection of mental states” after he shed his body.
TGU’s initial response, delivered via the computer keyboard, came on Thursday November 28, 1996, beginning 6:02 pm. I was aware at the time that it was more like an interim statement than a full reply.
TGU: Can you exist only as “the collection of mind states?” Could you? We’d like to see it, if you wouldn’t mind demonstrating.
The concept lacks any organizing principle. You, Ed Carter, exist as a unit that is body soul and mind, or however you care to phrase it. Take away the body and what have you? Mind and soul together, with nothing holding them as a unit? (To the degree that you in a body are a unit anyway; less so or rather differently than you think.)
What do you think your body is? A convenience to keep you anchored in a certain place/time? Well, that’s not so far off, in a simple view, but it is far from the total. It’s also and even primarily an expression of the soul and mind that created it and are somewhat modified by it and its experiences.
[On Wednesday evening, December 4, 1996, Ed called me from his home in New Hampshire and we had had one of our long phone conversations, in the course of which he made a point of paying me a couple of compliments that had the air of having been long thought and never previously said. In retrospect, the call was a farewell. I went to bed and awoke a few hours later, at about 4 a.m. I sat down at my compute.
At Ed’s request (and also out of my own curiosity) asked TGU to expand on their prior reply. For my own sake I also asked “what was going on last week when I asked on his behalf and got this constrained answer.”
TGU: What was going on was stage fright, as you well know, and you well know, as well, whose stage fright it was. [Mine, in other words.] It’s just another stage in development. Knowing that Ed knew something and knowing that you had read things, and NOT knowing if we knew the “right” answer, you choked, somewhat, and what came through was the limit of your audacity. Not that you need be ashamed of choking, given that the reaction stemmed from concern lest you pass on false information, but there is a certain amount of ego involvement here as well. Like all who bring in information from what you call “the other side” you want to have good information come in; you want to be known to bring in good information, and you don’t want to get caught, to see us get caught, flat wrong. And of course there is doubt still. Do the gentlemen upstairs know what they’re talking about? Do they even exist? Are you making it all up as you go along? But doubt is its own punishment (not that a “wrong” attitude warrants punishment, even by way of correction, but you know what we mean).
So having answered your more important (to you) question first, on to an explanation of our previous answer. Re-read it, then re-read the question.
Now, remember that in trying to bring across information you were painfully aware of having read something on the subject in one of the manuscripts you are incessantly reading. And you were determined not to let that information “contaminate” ours. Result, deadlock, because you were attempting to do two incompatible things: 1) bring in information by, as usual, being receptive without judgment, and 2) judge the information as it came in. You see the result, or lack of result. Now, note, this is not our way of “punishing” you. It is not the water’s way of “punishing” the hose when the hose gets kinked up and the water can’t flow through it. Neither is the hose’s “fault”; these things happen. We are only deepening your understanding of the process.
Of course you continue to have a body when you leave; your subtle body is the “organizing principle” we are hinting at. It is from the patterns underlying the subtle body that the physical body is constructed; this is why scars and other distinguishing marks are carried forth from one lifetime to another; it is also why weaknesses created in one lifetime (wounds, for instance) manifest in a succeeding lifetime; the pattern has been altered.
Now what should be of interest to you is this. You live, as we have said more than once, not consecutively as seen in earth time, but consecutively — to the limited extent that such a concept is meaningful here (that is, outside 3D theater) — in terms of soul growth, of soul experience. An individual soul may experience earth life in 1700 before it experiences it in 1325, then go to 1950, then 2000 BC. You understand? To speak of a soul’s chronology is somewhat misleading, in that in an important way it all happens (as you would perceive it) “at the same time,” or “at once”; or, let us say, that is as good a description as saying things happen one thing “at a time,” for how can things happen “one at a time” when here there is no time? Of course, there is no “here” either, but you see the difficulties of communication between the two “playing fields,” ours and yours, particularly when “ours and yours” are of course shared, and are only perceived in this analogy as separate.
Note too that when you change something “in the past” as you did on July 4 a couple of years ago, concentrating on your past in Gettysburg, you change not only that past but your present, as you healed your back at that time by healing “another’s”; it is not a mere stylistic convenience to say “you are all one.” But if an event changes now, the body that resulted in the past from —
Let us try again, as it is easy to get this twisted up.
You exist in 1996, but you previously existed in 1749, say. Now let’s say (though in your specific case this is not true, but let us say) that in your soul’s progression the 1996 lifetime came first; hence from the soul’s point of view the physical experiences in 1749 follow the physical experiences of 1996. And since the body is the expression of what happened to it previously — DON’T LET LOGIC GET IN THE WAY OF THIS, JUST TAKE IT DOWN — since the body is the expression of what happened to it previously, your changing yourself in the present changes what happens to bodies in the soul’s future, which can be in the chronological past; hence potentially changing the past; which impacts on where you are in the physical present. A circular process, you see, and far less constrained and “determined” than you (plural) usually think.
Now (Frank) re-read and absorb and we’ll deal with objections.
F: God! All right, if that’s the way it is, then someone in my soul’s past, inhabiting a future body, can change my “inheritance” now? And creates a new body each time it changes its own reality?
TGU: Not bad. That’s probably as close as you can get right now to getting our meaning. It begins to capture the evanescent quality, the now-you-see-it,-now-you-don’t quality, of life that your logic-choppers never get. This is why there are infinite alternate realities, by the way: every choice sets up new conditions in the soul-future and in the body-future, and these are curiously interlinked with the body-past and soul-past, so that each new decision is a carom shot that sends repercussions bounding wildly in all directions. Which by the way is the fun of our continual creation, and by “our” we of course do not mean TGU alone, but you and other dimensions as well. Think of life as a great game on a self-creating pinball machine. Fun! It ain’t all solemn purpose; experiencing is fun. Otherwise why do it?
F: Well you’ve given us some stuff to think about. I’ll send this out to some friends and see what it generates. Thanks.
TGU: As always, no charge. Just think of what some of your “past incarnations” just added to their subconscious memories tonight.
F: I had the computer mark the date and time as usual, and so I know that this consultation ended at 4:54 am. I sent it off to Ed as an e-mail message, which means he had all day Thursday to read it, though nobody can positively state that he did. Sometime that night, he left us. Was there a connection? I know only that the two things happened closely together in time. Something in the universe linked them.