Rita — our ideas about life and death change everything

Wednesday, March 2, 2016
F: 4 a.m. Today is the day my good friend Dave Schlachter died, back in 1970. That was hard. It makes me think how our lives are shaped by events that scar us, and how none of those events may mean what they seem to, at the time. I don’t remember, Rita – did I ever talk of David to you?
R: I think perhaps once, only. The impact of other deaths was more obvious.
F: Oh yes. JFK when I was 17, his brother – but not unexpected, that time, though the event blindsided me coming that early – when I was 22, then Dave at 24. Those things mark you even if you have changed your ideas about what death means. And of course I realize, ideas are one thing, emotions another. But the pattern remains. I remember as soon as I heard that Dave Wallis had been in an accident, my first response was, “I’m so tired of all my friends dying,” even though at the time there was no reason to think that’s what would happen – and I was, well, however old I was in 1998 – going on 52, I guess. It was just a natural response. It seemed like the pattern.
Somehow I don’t think this is off-subject. Is it?
R: No, of course not. Everything connects. Follow it to the end.

F: You mean the night I talked to Dave [Schlachter] in my house in Chesapeake. I don’t remember whether I had been to TMI yet, I think maybe not. I sat down with a pad and paper and did just what we’re doing now, come to think of it, only in those days it was just instinct, and I didn’t know if I believed it or not. I mean, the conversation came, it flowed, it made sense, but I didn’t know if it was anything more than imagination. If I had had to bet, I would have bet on its being real, but I wouldn’t have wanted to make it a big bet.
R: And the hypnotist?
F: Oh yeah. You’re pulling this together, so I take it there’s some point to it. When I did the Shirley MacLaine workshop in January, 1987, I wrote it up for the following Sunday’s newspaper, and was invited on a local radio show. The host was also a hypnotist past-life regressionist (self-taught) and I wound up buying a session from him, and although I didn’t know, later, how much to credit what we got, I got the sense of one life as a diviner in fire, in Roman times – and got that Dave had been my teacher. I wrote a little about this in Muddy Tracks, but I don’t think I said much about Dave. Okay, so–?
R: So one of the threads of your life – one major thread – is exploration without tidying-up. It’s a good combination, if not carried too far.
F: And I expect you’re going to tell us how it can be carried too far.
R: Indeed I am. It may be carried too far in either of two directions. One may explore so widely, or in so solitary a fashion, or one might say in so
F: Reckless?
R: Not reckless, exactly, though as you know we considered that word. No, perhaps “undisciplined” is the word. One may wander, you see. Or, alternatively, one may insist too much upon order and system, to the detriment of actual exploration.
F: You can’t always know what you’re doing or what it means, and you shouldn’t let those questions stop you, but you shouldn’t lose sight of them either.
R: That’s what I mean, yes. It is a balance. In your life I would say as I did when I was there, you tend to spend too little time in self-reflection, in retrospective observation and analysis. Of course, this reflects my bias as an academically trained researcher, but still it is a professional as well as personal observation.
Your life was shaped by a few great losses, unexpected, disruptive, and – most clearly to the point – productive of a conflict between emotion and thought, or emotion and idea of what the emotion “ought to be.” After JFK, you told yourself you were hardened and didn’t expect any better. After you read of Edgar Cayce and had absorbed ideas about reincarnation, you decided that death was no tragedy – often it appeared to be something desirable – and so it set you up to be critical of the feelings and emotions you did have, since they “didn’t make sense.”
F: Which makes me look pretty silly.
R: Perhaps we should say, it makes it look as though self-reflection would have smoothed your path a bit.
F: None of this is where I would have expected this entry to go.
R: As opposed to the rest of your life, which proceeds on schedule?
F: Very funny – or have I said that before?
R: Now, what makes you think that other people are any better prepared to deal with the questions of life and death, and the meaning they shed upon each other, than you were?
F: Aha, we’ve come to the meat of it?
R: Smiling at you but shaking my head too, just as when we were in 3D together. Not only that, but yes, that in part. People’s lives are blighted if they live in the shadow of what looks like defeat and futility.
F: An indictment of our whole civilization.
R: Perhaps analysis, or diagnosis, would be a more accurate word, but yes, of western civilization on the cusp of the new era.
F: I’m listening.
R: Surely you see – I know you do see, Frank, but not everyone sees, until it is pointed out – that a society’s beliefs about death directly impact their beliefs about every aspect of life. The courtroom oath swearing to tell the truth “so help me God” became meaningless when people ceased to believe in God – and that changes things. Putting “in God we trust” on coins and dollars and on the walls of public buildings is an idea that never would have – never did – occur to anybody until that instinctive belief had gone. Treating religions as merely social institutions could never come about while the existence of God was taken for granted.
Those appear to be religious beliefs, and they are – but they are equally beliefs about the meaning of life and death. The emerging civilization is a global civilization, disorienting to every part of it that until recently thought of itself as an absolute. Thus everybody’s ideas of life and death are being shaken. Thus, the explosive growth of fanaticism, which is always rooted in repressed uncertainty.
F: Yes, I get it – and now is the time for a new way of seeing life and death that can be acceptable to various narrower traditions. Toynbee would call it syncretism, I think.
R: Toynbee is in the non-3D now, so some of his ideas may have altered.
F: Smiling. Okay. So–?
R: So you have noticed it only peripherally (in your usual non-reflective fashion!) but this material is stirring things up in some people, in much the same way all my ideas were stirred up in 2001 when we began talking to the guys. I had thought I knew what to expect when I would die, and I found that I wasn’t even all that confident that I knew what it was that I was living. Your friend’s anniversary seemed a good time to reassure them that I have their perplexities and anxieties in mind.
F: I had thought we would continue where we left off yesterday.
R: It all connects. Sometimes it is more enduring, more textured, more thoroughly absorbed, if you make haste slowly, layering it in.
F: Feels like the end of the lesson, but I want to ask, if only for future reference, if we’re ever going to be able to tie in various ways of seeing the nature of the afterlife. Specifically, the questions around reincarnation. How could “I” have been a diviner in fire in ancient Roman days, and “Dave” my teacher, if we were created in the 20th century in America? How can any of us have had past lives or – for that matter – future lives? Obviously I get that threads connect us in various directions, but it seems to me a perception of past life actions and reactions implies a much more definite connection than what we are calling resonances, and more than just a generalized connection with everything that shares various threads.
R: And it is just such questions that can only be addressed by the environmental approach we have been pursing for 16 years 3D time.
F: By environmental I take it you mean, description of the surrounding circumstances in which we exist, so that we may better understand what and who we are.
R: It would be educational for the goldfish to incorporate the view from outside the fishbowl. How else could it get beyond the taking-for-granted, call it, that keeps the goldfish confined to unexamined assumptions?
F: And when I hear “unexamined assumptions” I hear, “insufficiently self-reflective.”
I didn’t quite say “insufficiently.” Everybody’s path is different, and nobody else can judge it very accurately. But still, I don’t see how more self-reflection could hurt.
F: And I suppose that’s the motto of the firm, here.
R: Well, it is one theme, anyway. There would be no point in going to all this trouble merely to produce an elegant model of life that has no effect on anyone, helps no one, leads no one to greater freedom. So it isn’t about mere description of life and death as seen from the non-3D, any more than from 3D. It is at least equally about this question, addressed continually (by implication) to one and all, and that is: What does this information mean for you? If it is to be more than entertainment (which is what casual curiosity may be seen as), what more, how more?
And on that note, I’ll bid you adieu until next time.
F: All right, Rita, our thanks as always.

9 thoughts on “Rita — our ideas about life and death change everything

  1. Wow. This is an incredible session. She could have been describing me–where I am on death–and she answered questions I was just developing in my head about spiritual theory and practice. And I could see so clearly what she was saying about self-reflection turning theory into practice, turning exploration into understanding. As the session began, I had a question in my head about our own spiritual experiences (like past-life regressions, seeing auras, talking to the dead, etc.) and their connection/relevance to Rita’s info, and this is what you began with. It’s like we spend our lives trying to get bread at the hardware store until someone points out the bread store. Thanks for the bread!

    1. And thanks for the feedback. It’s a weird thing, participating in something that doesn’t have any obvious relevance to where i am at that moment, and finding that it is very much front and center for someone else. Gratifying, too.

  2. Frank,
    Your discussion with Rita does NOT make you look silly! It shows you’re human and growing/learning your way toward more ‘individualization.’ More importantly, it shows your courage in sharing the process with the rest of us humans.

    MOST important (IMHO) is that you are working with Rita to bring this new deeper, ‘bigger’, information through. In the last two sessions she’s talked (rather forcibly!) about the work and effort needed to begin to understand; today she (brilliantly!) uses your life experiences to show the kind of work she means.

    She’s showing it’s not the mental work usually thought of … and likely not curing/fixing the worlds ills that seem so obvious. It’s the work of slowly and non-obsessively moving/shifting one’s OWN world view/belief system in the directions Rita/TGU point … perhaps the hardest work of all! But then “There would be no point in going to all this trouble merely to produce an elegant model of life that has no effect on anyone, helps no one, leads no one to greater freedom.”

    My ‘guidance’ is not given to verbalization, but occasionally (like today) I hear/feel ‘them’ giggling, dancing, and ‘high-fiving’ … think that means ‘you done good’ Frank!
    Jim

  3. …again, this feels like good material, and indeed this whole “theme of death as viewed from non-3D” is important to me as well, having been “hyper-aware” of the whole “mortality thing” since at least age 14. Of course, I had a lot of depression and anxiety issues as a teenager/young adult, and not just about dating, or what career would I choose! Many-a night, I’d awaken w/ the thought, “I’m going to die someday,” w/out any larger context to put that into, outside of sporadic reports of NDEs appearing in The National Enquirer (good gawd!), and some of the more esoteric interests of my immediate family (principally, Astrology and I Ching). When this occurred, I’d get up and pace around, occasionally going for a walk around the block at 3 AM, until the terror passed and I could sleep again.

    I’m at a point now where the “going within”/self-reflection process is needed, as is finding/trusting my own “uplink” to my Source Self/Collective, and I know I’ve said all this before. Not being as well-read as most folks asking these questions, I still don’t feel drawn to trying to assimilate the so many “theories of everything”, as that tendency had become a distraction, pulling me away from my own inner dialogues, and doing my own explorations. This material (i.e. the Frank/Rita dialogues), and the Seth material are my mainstays at this time…so again, I must say, this material coming forth is appreciated.

    Craig

  4. For some reason I’ve never felt death to be an issue – already when I was young the hindu goal of living so, that reincarnation will not be necessary, seemed a sensible goal. But I also know that fear, the sort of physical terror that can happen to an embodied being, that is a problem. To explore anything uncommon one has to have one’s wits at disposal. Feelings of impending death certainly stir up the scared animal. And that makes for all kinds of problems.

    Last night I dreamed/saw a completely abstract vision that felt like the bigger process. And there was nothing in it I could relate to. Pulsing, churning and moving. But when I woke up, I had this knowledge: this being human thing is about tuning the bigger being. We are doing things that the bigger being needs to have done. This is relieving for me, because there’s things in life that baffle me: Why is some stuff really easy to accomplish: just see the need and do it, and some things don’t happen though one tries for years and years? I’ve thought I am somehow failing in some things. But if I take the fuller picture into account: it may be that the part of me that is invisible to me has quite a big role in how things turn up. The anomalies are not failures, after all.

    Surprisingly, it seems that right now in dreams I see what my issues/problems/questions are (I dreamed about having an axe with me in bed – seems I am holding on to violence as last resort). When I wake up I have a knowing in me that can resolve the issue (I knew I need to find out ways to soften myself). In the mornings I feel I am so attuned to the bigger existence I feel I know so much…come to work and sit 2 hours in a meeting, and I am a regular zombie again. Guess which I’d prefer?

    Is there some pressure from the other side that we really pick up our work now? Time to align with the bigger process and be a bit more effective with it? Shake the ruse of good/bad/us/them/black/white, cool off on the drama and get to the real work?

      1. yup, thank you. I have to try and ponder a bit the synchronicities around the Rita sessions and things popping up in my head. What is going on? Do I dare to look?

      2. Thank you indeed Rita & Frank.

        I love the sense of humour from time to time.
        And what both Seth and Rita (with Frank) explaining: “You ARE your environment,” no more, no less.

        And as such (confirming the mood of the weather): there is still a lot of snow here though just now it is rainy and foggy.

        Hm,B & B, Inger Lise.

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