Rita on obstacles

Thursday, March 3, 2016
F: 3:35 a.m. Miss Rita, you’re up. I have forgotten exactly what trail you were following – it seems to me we detoured a little, recently – but I assume you know.
R: We haven’t detoured, not really. We are still pursuing what happens to the ex-3D soul, tracing its probable changes in awareness after physical death, so that we may sketch the nature of life in the new conditions. Fear of death is a part of what many souls bring to the experience, and a blankness of expectations, and a lifetime of outwards-looking attention that reinforces the idea of things happening to them, and of things being separate from them, and of things being somewhat arbitrary. All these misconceptions, or call them misperceptions, can get in the way of successful readjustment, which always depends, obviously, upon reestablishment of the ability to perceive accurately.
It should require no great intuitive leap to realize that in a non-physical-senses world – that is, a world where there is nothing “external” to oneself – one’s connection to and communication with one’s non-3D component is vital. Therefore, reestablishing that contact is vital, and primary – and also often most difficult and unpredictable in nature.
F: Now, that is a little bit of a surprise. I guess I had expected that the readjustment would be seamless once the ex-3D soul was in the same environment as the rest of the larger being.

R: But then, what of all the other things you know of?
F: The need for retrievals, you mean.
R: That, and so many other things. And note, for your own reassurance – you don’t have any idea what I’m going to list, do you?
F: I don’t. It’s like trying to outguess a Nero Wolfe novel, particularly after Nero tells Archie – and therefore the reader – that “the next step is obvious” and Archie and the reader say, “Oh sure, certainly. Glad it is. But what?”
R: If nothing else, it is good to know that you don’t know, because as usual once I list some things, they will be obvious enough. But I’m not Rex Stout, trying to baffle you and impress you. Take a moment. Think about it. What other evidence do you have that readjustment is not necessarily seamless, nor painless?
[Pause]
F: Ghosts, I suppose. Hauntings. The dread itself (dread of death, I mean). I don’t know, you tell me.
R: Ghosts is not a bad place to begin. A ghost might be defined as a split-off bit of consciousness still fixated on the 3D world, not so much retaining freedom of action as mechanically reconstructing certain 3D habit-patterns of action and interaction. It is outwardly fixed attention in the absence of full consciousness, you see, and also in the absence of the external drag of time moving it (that bit of detached consciousness) through “external circumstances” to move it along.
This definition also extends to the various destinations people arrive at after their 3D existence as a sort of halfway house. That is, they live out a simulacrum of 3D experience, not interacting with the 3D in the way ghosts do, but unconsciously recreating 3D illusions because that’s all they know.
F: Something like what Gordon Phinn’s books described. The one I published particularly, The Afterlife and How to Enjoy It.
R: That’s one variation, yes.
Now, we can profitably generalize from here. As long as a person’s perceptions are fixed in their ex-3D habits, they are going to be incompletely able to participate in their fuller being. Therefore to that extent they will find that their new reality conveniently matches their expectations – for a while.
F: Hmm. That’s interesting, that “for a while.” I get that the larger consciousness acts as a drag on the smaller consciousness’s reality.
R: It would perhaps be better to say, the ex-3D’s consciousness has gaps in the hermetically sealed set of rules it attempts to set up (for its comfort), and the larger reality leaks in through those holes. At some point the discontinuities make it not possible to maintain the illusion, and things change. Life in 3D proceeds in much the same way, only with the active assistance of the ever-moving present moment, to provide “external” stimuli via the illusion of separation in place and time.
Now, generalize farther. Any description of “the afterlife” is going to be metaphor, necessarily, but the 3D environment encourages the soul’s consciousness to concretize metaphor. And when the “external” 3D world drops away, what is the soul left with? Its own mental world, as it built it up during its 3D life!
Thoughts, ideas, memories, preferences, fantasies, conclusions – have consequences! You don’t think in one way (regardless how you act) and perceive in another way in the absence of externals.
F: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
R: Well, (I realize I’m on the other side of our old argument, here), isn’t it obviously so? Religions are not really based on descriptions of what the soul is going to find (though that is the popular assumption) – they are based on what the soul in 3D should do for its own good, so that when its time comes to graduate, it will be as prepared as possible.
F: I can certainly see that. The right mental habits – the right habits of character (I don’t know how to put it better than that) will be vastly more important than the right preconceptions of what’s waiting for us.
R: Let’s say the right habits will be more real. Metaphor drops away in so far as a soul is conscious and able to react to its true new circumstances. That’s why Christians, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, materialists, worshippers of Odin and Ra and Quetzalcoatl and a million variations on the theme are equally able (or equally unable) to deal with “the next world,” because ability (or inability) to cope does not depend upon belief but upon on-going perception. Members of any number of different, even violently conflicting, belief-systems will or won’t have trouble depending not upon what they expected, but upon what they lived.
F: It always struck me that Jesus was most emphatic against hypocrisy and unconsciousness. Woe to those whose insides and outsides didn’t agree, so to speak.
R: And now you see why. Remember, scriptures may be read in many ways, because one half of what is there is the set of assumptions the individual brings to the reading. But you know that. In fact, you used to insist upon it.
F: Yes, I still do. I say they aren’t a rulebook nor a physics textbook, but a set of instructions, much of which has to be inferred between the lines. It isn’t the organizers who write scriptures; often enough I suspect they don’t even understand them very much.
R: All right, well you see, the obstacles to readjustment were obvious enough, were they not? You knew them, but weren’t thinking of them in that context. (And, in that, you were somewhat in the position of church officials protecting scripture they know is important but don’t necessarily know in meaning or intent.)
[Pause]
So that’s our lesson. One stage of many people’s readjustment is a sort of unconscious or even semi-conscious clinging to the familiar, in new conditions that are not familiar. As long as the need for reassurance outweighs the need to see more clearly, there they may remain. [Emphatically:] And there’s nothing wrong with that! It is, you might say, merciful, or at least compassionate, that things are set up that way.
F: And it’s still “as above, so below,” isn’t it? Because that same choice – “explore or rest with what you know” – is how our 3D mental life has been described.
R: Yes, same process of course. If you had chosen to rest on your oars after our work while I was in the 3D, there would have been no penalty, it wouldn’t have been seen as a wrong turning. You always have the right to choose – and the right to choose means, of course, the right to choose as you wish, not as some external force or abstraction wishes. But if you choose, you choose the ensuing consequences. Most of life’s miseries, and most of life’s annoyances, for that matter, stem from people wanting to choose but not accepting the consequences of that choice.
F: Wanting to have their cake even after they have already eaten it.
R: There’s a reason certain sayings persist, you know.
F: You don’t have to persuade me!
R: All right, so now we may pause and you may proceed with your day.
F: Our thanks as always, Rita. I know you are aware of other people’s gratified reaction to the material.
R: Better than you are, in fact. Fewer obstacles to perception. Until later, then.

4 thoughts on “Rita on obstacles

  1. A great session! I dreamed last night of the “halfway house” experience she describes. It was an amusement park scenario, but people were moving through it anxiously, wanting to cling to it but feeling the change upon them. It made me think of the post-battle scene in the movie Atonement–it has that same feel. People trying to live the gap as if that’s all there is. Your material is evocative but it’s more than that. It connects things, clarifies them, and they become transformational. It helps to be reminded of the need for reflection on all of this in order to really move into it. Thanks so much, Frank & Rita!

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