Rita on the first stage of transition from the 3D

Friday, February 19, 2016
F: 6:25 a.m. Hard to get moving. Blank as to where we go next, so depending on you, Rita.
R: Division of labor. You show up, I’ll show up, and we’ll get there. We’ve done all right so far.
Now, consider what we’re doing. I want to describe to you what cannot easily be described in sensory terms, so rather than adding characteristic after characteristic, we will at first proceed by a process of subtraction – and in fact that is one description of how life does it, as well, when we die to the 3D and awaken to the non-3D. It could be described as a process of subtraction. First we lose the physical senses, so that we may regain the use of our non-physical senses. This is very rough, but may serve as an orienting idea.
So, there I am on my deathbed. First I lost the power to communicate with the 3D world. This is important, as it begins to re-orient us. We communicate [during life], expecting or anyway hoping for some response. This orients us outward, toward the perceived “other” in the 3D world. But when that communication is shut down, we reorient. An analogy might be, the world of sleep. While we sleep, even if we dream, we are not oriented toward a response from the “outside world.” That is, we do not expect to channel our communication toward a perceived-as-separate world that can be accessed only by means of the physical senses. We let that world fall away – or, you might say, we forget it is there. That is the first stage of dying to the 3D, too. We forget the 3D world is there.
Notice, I am not talking about the stages of going from health to death, I’m not describing the process of physical death. I’m describing the process of awakening to the larger world.

F: I think you’re meaning to make a distinction you haven’t quite made, between the physical dying and the mental re-orientation. But, even saying that, I can feel the difficulty of putting it. Hopefully this is enough. So –?
R: The re-orientation is a big change. If you were clinging to life and terrified of death, I can’t imagine how it would go – although perhaps your non-3D component would flood in to reassure the 3D-oriented mind that all would be well.
F: People often see predeceased relatives waiting for them.
R: In any case, that was not my situation. Even if I had not had the coma to provide a lengthy experience of what we might call sheltered reorientation, I did not come to the change in fear anyway. I was unsettled, because I no longer knew what to expect, but I was curious, and more than ready to turn the page.
F: How well I remember. You looked at me one day and said, kind of helplessly, “I don’t know why I’m still here.”
R: Not-clinging is a great aid toward a smooth transition, of course. Kids don’t go down a sliding board clinging to the sides and scrambling to get back to the ladder, or, if they do, they don’t have the experience as it is designed.
F: Writing that, I got a sense of kids using the slide to get a delightful sense of letting go, of launching themselves into the blue, but in a safely controlled fashion.
R: Of course. That is the attraction – the casting one’s fate to the winds (knowing that it’s safe to do so, and maybe trying not to know it front-and-center, to augment the sense of recklessness that provides the fun).
So, I lost the orientation toward the 3D world, and, as I say, it is something like sleep in that it [the 3D world] appears to drop away. No, that isn’t it. It doesn’t appear to drop away, it disappears. It is forgotten. Memory may remain, and dream and fantasy, all needing to be sorted out, but just as in dreams, your awareness is on your end of the communication, not on input from, or output to, a perceived 3D world.
These are simple concepts, and I hope people won’t complicate them by parsing my words too finely. You lose the ability to connect with the “outside” world, you cease to intend to or expect to, and in reorienting you find that your awareness is now upon a world at first consisting entirely of your own mental constructions.
F: “You find” doesn’t mean you are aware of the change, though.
R: No, very much not. Perhaps I should say “it happens,” or “behind your back.” That is a good point. You are not aware of the scene changing, any more than you are when you dream.
So, with the 3D gone, your natural orientation toward it gone, you are more in the world you have experienced in dreams than in any solid stable mental structure. And this, you see, is why what you do in life matters in this regard. Your mental habits may make the transition easier or harder, and will in any case shape it.
I don’t mean to imply that the purpose of life is to assure a smooth transition! That would be like saying the purpose of eating a meal is to make it easier to wash the dishes afterwards. But it does have that effect, and you might as well know it.
I see no point in trying to describe the various worlds people will find that they have, in effect, created for themselves. Let’s stick to what Rita experienced, because Rita is the closest experience I have.
F: I sort of understand what you just said, but a little clearer?
R: You tend to think of me as Rita [now] in the non-3D, and so I am, but that isn’t all I am, and therefore it isn’t quite what I am. But our shared Rita experience is the bridge between us, so it is convenient to funnel the communication through that part of me.
F: That sends me thinking. I experience Jung, and Thoreau and Hemingway and all, precisely through that part of whatever else they are now, which means it is almost fiction on their end. Here I’ve been worrying if it were fiction on my end.
R: Not fiction on our end, and not pretending, either. We are what we are, and what we were is one part of what we are. But – I am reminding you – only part. That will become more obviously important shortly.
So my world constricted and expanded. It changed focus, say. Perhaps that is more accurate. Death turns the knob of the microscope and the plane that had been clear and obvious becomes hazy or non-existent, and other things swim into view. Again, as when we sleep.
But sleep – and dreams – that is only analogy. A close one, but analogy, not identity. Try to remember that. (Not that your idea of sleep and dream is particularly accurate anyway. But let it go as analogy and don’t cling to the sides of the sliding board.)
The world I opened up to, or that filled my consciousness, of course changed as I went along. It unfolded in stages. That’s just the nature of progression, first a little, then more, then before you know it you are in new territory, then you start remembering it, then you are in your new home. (But your journey doesn’t end there either, of course. The nice thing about life is, it never ends. There’s always more to come.)
The first stage came when I was still defining myself as Rita. And, see, here is where you are going to have to loosen, without discarding, that analogy to dreaming. Unlike dreaming, or perhaps we might say unlike your 3D memories of dreaming – or, come to think of it, like lucid dreaming in this one respect., you don’t lose consciousness of yourself as actor or spectator. You are as aware of yourself as experiencer as you ever were aware of yourself as experiencer in waking 3D life. So, it isn’t fantasy and it isn’t free-flow association either, neither mental nor emotional free-flow. What it is could be described as life coming at you, same as always, only now it is entirely subjective and not disguised as “objective” in the sense of being somehow or somewhat disconnected from you.
F: I think I see that. Not positive it will be seen as clearly expressed.
R: Well, rephrase it, for insurance.
F: I heard you saying that with the senses no longer orienting us to life, we still experience ourselves as a consciousness at the center of whatever we experience. Things keep happening – not as the result of our willing them (as in Lucid Dreaming) but apparently on their own, following some law we don’t necessarily know about. I mean, just following their own nature, whatever that may be.
R: That’s right. That is the first stage after the senses are gone. We still define ourselves as we were, but it looks like the scenery had changed, and then the rules of the game. But that’s for next time.
F: Hmm, as head-stuffed-with-cotton as I felt when we started this, I’m surprised we did this well. Okay, next time, then.
R: Next time, and thanks for your co-operation – you, and anyone reading this. We’re all in this enterprise together.
F: That’s what Captain Kirk used to say.
R: And as you used to say, and still do – very funny.
F: Smiling. See you later.