Rita — the stages after judgment

Wednesday, February 24, 2016
F: 12:35 p.m. Well, Rita, let’s see if we can continue. I seem to be more or less back from my exertions of last night Where were we?
R: You – the nominal person who just died to the 3D world – have gone through a couple of difficult stages, of which judgment of your failings was probably the most painful. But as acceptance replaces condemnation, you are ready to move again.
F: You’ve stopped holding on to the sides of the sliding board.
R: That’s right. Among the fears, perhaps chief is not “I can’t take this” but “I’m worried about how much worse it can get.” At some point, in one way or another (and I do not intend to stay to even suggest the [possible] ways, let alone detail them), you release your hold on what you knew of what you are. You allow yourself to see more deeply.
Now, this “seeing more deeply”

F: Sorry [Lost it.]
R: You have passed your first hurdle of unbearable self-criticism, and you are resigned to seeing what comes next. But remember, it is still that process of understanding A and B better by successively looking at each with slightly better understanding, and then seeing differently. In other words, you are alternating perception and discernment, just as in life. That connected two-part process is a mental process, following mental (that is, non-3D) laws, which is why it is unchanged even in the absence of the body and of relentlessly sequential time.
One purpose in spelling that out at this point is to emphasize that a change in perceptions in the non-3D – and not just a change, but many changes, and not just in the recovering-from-3D-assumptions process – does not depend upon shocks to the system.
Sometimes, yes, there are shocks. But just as you do not need to hit potholes to steer your car, so you do not need to experience emotional convulsions to change your way of seeing things. Mostly, you need to have let go of the sides of the sliding board. Gravity will take care of the rest.
F: And, I suspect, invisible hands, as well.
R: That’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
So, you have absorbed the shock to your self-esteem, and you have accepted any guilt attached to your not having done more with your life, or better. You have learned that the narrative wasn’t just the way you experienced it (or, one might equally say, the way you constructed it.)
Then comes further transformation, that makes what went before into the slightest of prologs.
A parenthesis, here: I am not going to describe large portions of that early stage that may have been described in NDE literature. There’s no point, because even if there are generalities, still every new recovery from 3D is different. Not everybody experiences everything, which is only what your everyday experience should suggest would happen. So, the tunnel, the light, the being met by relatives, the River Styx and the ferryman in whatever metaphysical disguises – you may, or you may not. I’m moving beyond all that, but it occurred to me to mention it lest you think I’d forgotten, and lest you think I was by silence contradicting such testimonies.
So, the transformation. Again this may occur in different orders and for all I know may be partly skipped by some, but the generality will fit here.
You see yourself as you have always seen yourself, as an individual who had gotten born, had grown and lived a life interacting with others (human, animal, vegetable, mineral and – depending on your perception – perhaps other kingdoms).
You look closer and you see how you affected others and were being affected. In other words, you see that you lived not independently but as part of the web of life. This is about the stage in the process where your regrets are likely to be strongest.
You absorb that and look again and you begin to see ties you perhaps did not expect to see. There are invisible connections – visible, now, for the first time – between you as the individual and everyone and everything you experienced. Every book or movie, every association or society, every conversation, every ancient philosopher whose life or work touched yours, every piece of music – and therefore all the musicians who made that music.
At some point you see these connections are not merely points of contact, but representations of tendencies.
F: Strands.
R: Exactly. Music may seem to connect you to that particular musician, but as you look closer, perhaps you see that the reason why it connected was (as a result rather than a cause) because you share a thread, or a strand, with that musician.
Then it is a short step to see that all the people sharing that thread may be said to be an integral part of you.
And there are uncounted numbers of threads, each with uncounted numbers of others sharing them, not all human. Your self-definition takes a serious hit, and either shrinks back or expands depending upon your temperament.
Another way it can go (remember, there is not a necessary fixed sequence among these realizations, the unfolding will vary with the individual)
F: Sentences are getting pretty long, and I know why, but maybe we could work to have more of them but shorter.
R: You have the pen. Adjust as you think best. Remember you are the one who liked writing the report; I preferred to do endless research.
So, another realization moves back and forth in time as part of that same expansion of self-definition. You realize [that] “you” — in a sense – lived in other times and places, and can connect those other parts of yourself in that way, in the same way you can connect along threads or any other relationship.
There could be more examples, but that is enough. The point is, you start off thinking you are an individual and you find yourself realizing that yes you are, but also no you aren’t and never were.
Yes, you are and were, because you as soul were deliberately created by assembling potential traits, and were inserted into a given time and place to form a consciousness mediating your constituent parts. Thus, you were created, you were born into one body that assured that all your strands would experience that life together, you decided several million things, several million times in your lifetime, and so you created the habit-pattern that would (in a sense) be born into the non-3D to function along with its elders. All that is pretty individual, wouldn’t you say?
At the same time, you were never an individual in the way you thought you were. The soul was created and born, yes, but what was it created of? Two elements at least: (1) threads of strands that had been formed by their own previous 3D existence, now continuing to live through you and anyone else sharing their strands. (2) The indefinable spirit that animates us all. As far as we know, it has always been here, it remains vital and unchanged, and if it needs us, we don’t know why it does or for what it uses us.
Either way you look at it, though, you aren’t what you thought you were, but something far greater. At the same time, you see that at best you are a very small frog in a very big puddle. It’s enough to shake you up.
And I’m going to stop here, a little sooner than usual, both to save you fatigue and because this is a convenient place to pause before we show how the newly redefined soul meets The Guys Upstairs.
F: Looking forward to it. Till next time. Thanks.