Rita — going through judgment

Monday, February 22, 2016

F: 4:10 a.m. So, things are getting very interesting, Rita. Something of a desert, the hours between talking to you and being able to do it again. Pray continue.

R: Yes, and of course it is a pleasure to have an interested and appreciative audience. Communication is flow, and flow is life.

To proceed. You die to the 3D world and your world is now your own mental world, your subjectivity, in a way you did not experience previously, perhaps, except in dreams. Your previous communication with the parts of yourself you were not conscious of may have taken place entirely without your conscious knowledge; or you may have had anomalous experiences; or perhaps you casually or occasionally or routinely or systematically made it a practice to broaden that communication. You can see that in each of these cases, your reaction to the experiences that follow cessation of sensory contact with the 3D is going to be different. What is familiar will evoke different reactions than what is not.

But in any case, your first experience is going to be a confrontation with yourself as you were rather than yourself as you conceptualized yourself. Your idea of who you were is going to meet the reality of who you were.

Now, by that I don’t mean, you were a fraud. And I don’t mean, quite, that you weren’t who you thought you were (although that is true as well). I mean, more, that nobody gets to look at themselves as they are, but only as they look in a mirror, so to speak – and mirrors reflect us to ourselves only to a limited degree – backwards, for one thing, and usually only from one vantage point. We see a small amount, and infer more, and confuse a lot of what we really are with what we wish we were and what we imagine we are.

F: It is said, we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.

R: Largely true, and hard to avoid, because in each case we judge by what is easiest to observe. But now, conditions are different, and in effect everything changes. You know how NDE accounts often stress that one’s past-life review demonstrates all one’s actions not only again from one’s own viewpoint but also from the viewpoint of everyone else involved. Well, that is cramming a non-3D, non-sequential experience into 3D sequential terms.

F: I can see that. It isn’t that you are watching a movie, but that you suddenly see wider and deeper.

R: Yes except “suddenly” is a time-oriented term that may mislead. I am describing the change as part of a natural process, a sort of flowering, a blossoming-out as the soul decompresses from its long 3D experience.

F: I thought yesterday, this almost sounds like describing a 3D life as the birth canal, and death as the entering forth into independent life after the long period of safe gestation. That isn’t how life usually feels! And yet, I can see it that way, the way you are describing things. We are conceived of strands brought together for the purpose, we spend a certain amount of time growing the organism and learning which wires move which control surfaces, getting ready to function in the real world, and then we’re born – we die to 3D-only experience. Yes?

R: It is an analogy. Play with it and see if it is useful. But I don’t want to get diverted at the moment.

You see your life, now [that is, at the stage she is describing], from all sides at one, so to speak. To a greater or lesser degree, you pass through a phase of judgment of yourself. The more judgmental you are, the more painful the process, for nobody is perfect. Nobody lives up to his or her standards. Nobody is “without sin,” so to speak.

However – this is only a phase. It is not imposed from without and it isn’t exactly necessary as part of the process. It is, shall we say, a likely part of the process, the result of a bad habit, you might say.

F: “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

R: Or perhaps, judge not lest your habit of judging others is going to turn itself on itself when all “external” life is gone.

But judging yourself is only a habit! It is only a stage you go through. If you don’t go through it at all (as little children wouldn’t, perhaps) your process is smoother and less painful. If you cannot get out of it, you get stuck, and here you see souls experiencing themselves in hell.

F: Or in purgatory, I suppose – the place souls are said to reside while they burn clean.

R: Well, that’s it, you see – and again, I should have listened psychologically when you brought out memories of your Catholic theology. Purgatory makes no sense as a destination, just as judgment by God makes no sense. But purgatory as a description of the result of a psychological process is another story.

Judgment contains the assumption that there was a standard against which one could be (and would be) measured. As long as you see your remembered life in the context of judgment, just that long are you going to be enmeshed in regret and humiliation and pain and a vain wish that you had been other than you were. And this condition is particularly painful because you can’t get a grasp on it so as to steer it (as you did when in 3D) to less painful thoughts, or more self-approving channels. You are, in effect, caught in a nightmare from which there is no exit.

F: Yikes.

R: “Yikes” indeed.

F: I can almost feel we should stop here, that is so dramatic a place.

R: However, this is not “The Perils of Pauline,” so we will continue. [“The Perils of Pauline was the first “cliff-hanger series.] This stage of judgment – of self-judgment, let me emphasize – lasts as long as it lasts. There are several variables that determine how long. One is the degree to which the conscious mind has been accustomed to blocking out data and impulses and – in a word – guidance from its non-3D self, like a headstrong teenager. Obviously, the easier the non-3D can smooth the way by suggesting there is another way to see things, the better. Another is, as I say, the extent to which the 3D has been in the habit of judging rather than accepting. In a way, that habit is the same habit as refusing input from guidance; it is an insisting on its own 3D-limited viewpoint as absolute. A third variable may be considered (by the soul undergoing the process) external, and we won’t go into that quite yet.

In any case, the soul, upon losing access to the 3D world, confronts itself not only (not even primarily) as it has been, but as it is.

You see? In 3D you naturally assume that the departed soul sees its life primarily or entirely in the context of the 3D life it just departed, or emerged from, rather. But is that how you live your life day to day while still in 3D? Do you wake up each morning comparing yourself to what you were in fifth grade? Or do you address yourself to the questions confronting you in your present moment? This is often lost sight of, it seems to me, in discussing the soul’s emergence. It may be bewildered and its only immediate frame of reference may be oriented toward the 3D life that is all it remembers (at first), but the past is not its concern. What it needs to know is, “Where do I go from here? What do I do? Who and what am I?”

It is the same group of questions that surround you in 3D, you see, only the conditions are different.

Now, we are rapidly running out the clock, so let me just finish with this stage of emergence.

While you are in judgment, progress stops. You go over and over it, unable to correct past errors, unable to retroactively make better choices, unable to – in short – make amends to others or (in a sense) to yourself. “I could have done so much better” is the theme song of this stage. But it doesn’t last forever. It changes, the moment – whether the moment come slowly or all at once – that you realize that what has been done has been done, and you are what you have made yourself, and now what?

F: That is acceptance, isn’t it? “And now what?”

R: Once you decide to get on with it, you are through with the vain regrets. Regret and judgment is a form of grabbing the sides of the sliding board, you know. Once you let go of having to be right (for that is what the habit of judgment is all about), progress resumes and you’re moving again. Everything changes, as we shall see.

F: This is fun, Rita. Many thanks, and how long until tomorrow morning?