Rita — a tap on the kaleidoscope

Thursday, February 18, 2016
F: 4:35 a.m. Reading proofs for Rita’s World Volume II, as you undoubtedly know. [Actually, reviewing formatting and going over the text one more time before copy editing. But the idea is the same] Chasing my tail, it sometimes feels like. That was a year ago, and here we are again.
R: Not a complaint, I take it.
F: No, certainly not. Just, it’s striking. To me this is such a small part of a long life, yet it may be the only part that endures. If it does. That makes it sound like I’m thinking of it as a legacy, but that isn’t what I mean. I mean, what a small percentage of my time and what a large percentage of what I actually accomplish.
Anyway, onward. I was going to glance back at yesterday’s, but – let’s just continue as you prefer.
R: Keep in mind one image, or one central idea, that we are going to look at life as TGU experiences it – “day by day” so to speak. That is what I wanted to know, and what you want to know, and what some, at least of our readers will want to know. What is it like to live in the now without restriction. What is it like to live as part of a greater whole, neither losing our identity nor living in isolation. These things, rather than the more theoretical questions sometimes raised, will be conveyed, with luck and perseverance.

F: That does seem to focus things.
R: The question, “How do you spend your time? What do you do?,” really amounts to, “What is life in those circumstances,” you see.
Now let me recommend that people read Far Journeys, only heed Bob [Monroe]’s warning that it is necessarily a translation of a translation of a translation, and not take it so literally as to turn it into scripture or lies. By reading it sympathetically, you can get the underlying sense of it between the lines – which is the only way some things can be conveyed.
We are not going to repeat what Bob tried to convey, for a couple of reasons. First, you and I, Frank, have a personal history of working to get this information while I was in body, and so we have an advantage Bob did not have. Two, he proceeded from the point of view of 3D and of the individual, and we will work from the opposite end of each polarity – from the non-3D and from the larger-more-comprehensive-than-the-individual. And three, we will not be – and have not been – working in the awful isolation that Bob endured throughout his life. He was lonely as all true pioneers must be, and that loneliness provided its advantages and drawbacks as any situation will.
F: I hear, between the lines, that you and I had the advantage of the community that he established, which could not be as useful to him as it is to those who followed.
R: He was fortunate – or guided – to have the New Land Community, and [his wife] Nancy, to leaven his isolation; and of course remember that in his case, too, what he did in this aspect of his life was a smaller part of the total time than others might think.
F: “Always there is life,” Thoreau said, “which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction.”
R: And a divine dis-satisfaction, too! It is as well to remember that, in moments of discouragement or difficulty. You will remember, I went through years of quiet spiritual depression before the guys arrived to give us new meaning and a new approach.
Now, as so often, this will appear to be diversion or diffusion or digression. I can feel, though, that you, at least – if not necessarily all our readers – have learned to have a little more faith that it is not, and to spend a little time later finding the connections it establishes with the material.
Let us return to that central image. I am in the eternal “now” in a way that you are (in your non-3D aspect) and are not (in 3D). I am Rita as Rita was formed and concreted in nearly nine decades of 3D choosings, but I am also that Rita newly aware of my being only part of a larger and more encompassing being. And I as part of that larger being am aware that I / we are only a part of larger beings, ad infinitum, and smaller ones, because all is ultimately one. There are no absolute divisions in the All-D, any more than in 3D, therefore not in the non-3D either.
So what am I? how do I now experience myself?
It would be as well for you – for each of you – to do some mental stock-taking of all the aspects of the afterlife or heaven or however you think of non-physical life, and see how disconnected they are – or, if not disconnected but coherent, how partial they are.
Past lives, for instance. Angels, perhaps in hierarchies. God, perhaps, and the devil. Communities or families in heaven. Bruce Moen’s “hollow heavens” and Bob’s belief-system territories. Lost souls. Souls needing retrieval. “Energies.” Saints, helpers, spirit guides. And plenty more, and each may make a different list. What is missing is a common way to see all these partially perceived, partially deduced characteristics, and, beyond that, a way to relate that common way to 3D life in an ordinary and not a “woo-woo” construction. That need not be as impossibly huge a job as it appears; it mostly requires a tap of the kaleidoscope. But it does require that tap.
F: And the tap, I take it, is your description of life as you experience it.
R: That’s right. Not as Scripture, not as science, not even as anthropology. Just a tap that may function as does the finger pointing at the moon. It isn’t the finger that is important, but the vector it sets up. And a different finger from a different starting-place is not contradiction but confirmation.
F: And we’ll bear in mind the joke, “Please don’t bite my finger, look where I’m pointing.”
R: If we get our metaphysical fingers bitten, no great harm.
Now, one way to provide that tap is to use the classic model of exposition, and proceed from the familiar to the less familiar. This is not the only way we might proceed, but it should do nicely. So let’s revisit my own reawakening and see if that doesn’t provide the explanation with the necessary grounding in the familiar.
F: That’s an ingenious idea. I wouldn’t have thought of it. Didn’t.
R: It is one way to proceed.
Very well, as you will remember, I left 3D life in a very deliberate manner, remaining several days in a coma to preserve a stable platform while I explained what was to come. This avoided quite a few problems.
F: I think you might explain that.
R: The body, anchored as it is in 3D and 3D’s encasement in a moving and recalcitrant time-frame, provides a stable reference point that allows one to explore the non-3D without the risk of one’s [mental] projections becoming confused with an “external” reality – whence comes every form of delusion and lost-ness.
F: The bardos?
R: Let’s just stay with delusions. If one explores and gets “lost,” so to speak, but is still tied to a body in a place and time, one gets reeled back in before too long, and nothing lost and some experience gained.
F: I see. And that’s what you were doing.
R: Not consciously from the 3D side, of course. (And, parenthetically, this is another advantage of being on good terms with one’s non-3D aspect; less friction between purposes.) But yes. That’s what I was doing. When I released the 3D – dropped the body, as TGU always put it – I was conscious already, so did not experience the disorientation that sometimes may occur. But that is not the same as saying that I was instantly aware of all I was, or all I was part of.
F: You had a stable platform, so to speak, but you had all the world to explore.
R: That isn’t wrong, but let’s say, I had attained a stability of consciousness that would prevent me from losing my sense of myself, and yet that was pretty much all I had, at first. Like you, like anybody, I had a hodge-podge of ideas about the afterlife, and no way to know which were true, which were false, and which were distortion. The only way to find that our is – well, it’s twofold. Experience as in feeling around, and Remembrance as in reconnection. In a sense, the same thing seen two ways. In a sense, very different processes. But we don’t have time to begin on this now, so let us pause until next time.
F: All right. It’s an hour anyway. Thanks, Rita, as always.