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.

6 thoughts on “Rita — the stages after judgment

  1. This “thread” continues to be very mind-expanding for me. I consider this work to be the “heavy-duty” version of most of my reading material of late; there is another book I’m currently reading, a channeled personality who took his own life, and is describing the “afterlife” thru a series of mediums. I kinda look at this as “Death-Lite”.

    By “heavy-duty” I mean that this mat’l requires thought and processing, whereas the other book is kind of “pat and simplistic”, I think (but since I am not a medium, I cannot know for sure). I’m also appreciating this discussion as further reminder to begin “unflinchingly” (if possible) examining my current life, up ’til now, in order to release some of that guilt/shame I’ve felt for many of my years (I recall when we met you last year, Frank, that you said “(I) would’ve made a good Catholic”!) As far as the “pain and terror” of facing one’s self “naked of any defenses”, I am reminded of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s harrowing, but ultimately freeing, experience she described, the night she stayed in “Owl Cottage” at Whistlefield Farm, ca. July 1976 (I read this account in the first Bob Monroe biography, “Catapult”, by Bayard Stockton, I think was his name).

    Also of interest to me is the idea of identifying my tendencies, by identifying my threads of “resonance”. In music for me, it’d be a pretty small list; I’ve enjoyed many individual songs by many artists, but seldom their whole body of work. One possible exception (and thus possible “shared thread”) is Pat Metheny. In “classical” art/painting, it’d be Vincent Van Gough and Claude Monet.

    So, this “small frog” returns to his little rock for a while to ponder these ideas, and hopes “frog’s legs” are not on tonight’s menu…

    Craig

    1. How extraordinary, talk about synchronicity, strands and threads….

      I met Bayard Stockton in Santa Barbara, shortly before his death in 2006, when he ran an absolutely wonderful adult ed, current events class titled “As The World Turns.” His guest speakers were just astonishing, for instance, the General Counsel of the UK in Los Angeles, on the eve of Bush’s ‘surge’ of more troops into Iraq. I dated him several times, what a wonderful, interesting and complex life and man he was! Unfortunately, the age difference was just too great, and we stopped seeing each other in that way. At the time, I wasn’t aware of ‘Catapult,’ the Bob Monroe biography, and he didn’t mention his experience at the Institute. (Maybe didn’t want to scare me off!) But evidently, the connection (or thread/strand?) was there, even though neither of us realized it. That connection, this whole subject, is one of the most important and compelling of my life, and here I am reading about Bayard here on Frank’s blog.

      I’m enjoying this immensely, it surely does resonate and ring true to me. Thanks SO much to Rita, Frank and all who comment, it’s just such a wonderful, unfolding experience.
      Chey

  2. Once again, she answers my questions as I have them, and I feel the fit. I do wonder if there is any joy in the transition through the regrets of not being better, etc., or anywhere in the process of transitioning?
    Thanks so much for sharing this.

    1. Hi Janie,

      I’m not sure if this will address your question about joy or not, but I read your comment this afternoon, and immediately had the thought (when thinking about the “question of joy” in my 3D life to date), “How much/how often have I experienced joy in my life, here in ‘3D-land’?” The same question could apply to “shame/regrets” on my part.

      For me, anyway, that’s why I feel it’s important to start the “ruthless self-examination” part now, while I’m still in 3D (while also taking time to recognize my connections w/ “All-D”), which may “soften the blow” of that early stage of transition. And I say “ruthless” for me only, as I have been my own worst “critic”!

      Craig

  3. Thanks !
    What fell into my eyes this time around about the things told by Rita is… “I preferred to do endless research”….
    Hm, well well, sometimes you are getting a kick somewhere to do a whole lot of things (in the spiritual spheres).
    The danger about it can be to fall into a trap in to become “ROOTLESS,” in that you have tried so much over and over again. Sometimes it is working all wonderful for a while (felt as to be in heaven), and then other times nothing changes at all (you are back to the same old pattern in life with the very same old habits as before).

    I am trying to make an inner balance and to stay with it no matter what happens on the outside. It is demanding a Master and obviously also daily meditations.
    Therefore I search my book shelves once again, this time to find a book titled: “The Experience of Meditation.” Experts Introduce the Major Traditions, edited by Jonathan Shear. And foreword by Ken Wilber.
    The book contains:
    Zen – Transcendental Meditation – Taoism/Qigong – Yoga – Sufism – Kriya Yoga – Tibetan Buddhism – Integral Yoga – Christianity – Therevada Buddhism.

    I watched a TV-program about Sufism a couple of weeks ago…VERY interesting…But I became seasick and dizzy by looking at them swaying like a carousel. That`s what balance is all about, I am really admiring those folks.

    ACIM says:”Love does not condemn. All are called. Few Choose to Listen.”

    B & B, Inger Lise.
    P.S. Nice weather in these days, who knows for how long it`ll last. Hmm, one positive and one negative pronouncement (laughs). Judge Not.

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