Rita — hero journeys

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

F: 5 a.m. Rita, Bob Paddock asks “what is / was my role in all of this Karen stuff?”

For the studio audience, his wife suffered for years from an undiagnosed or misdiagnosed condition that made life an agony of pain. It turned out to be a leak of spinal fluid that brought pain whenever she was not lying down. Worse, the medicines she was given made everything worse. Finally she reached the limit of endurance, and killed herself, leaving him devastated. To say more feels like an invasion of privacy, so let’s leave it there.

I know that you know more about it than I have said, for two reasons – your direct connections in non-3D, and what you pick up from me in our temporary joint mind as I consider the subject at the moment. So – thoughts?

R: The question has various facets. What did his connection mean to her, what did his experience of her suffering mean for him, what is the effect upon others, and – perhaps most pointedly for him at the moment – “where does he do from here?” That is, how to not only make sense of it from various perspectives, but how to use it to see a path forward.

It is not only your own preference that counsels discretion in public. He would be well to find a discreet and competent grief counselor, professional or otherwise, to help him untangle the complicated emotional responses that follow such a prolonged ordeal and its culmination. Grief, anger, shame, guilt – there are many interconnected dynamics that it would be well for him to learn to understand so that he can defuse them and reconnect with his capacity for joy. But that is not what he has asked, and it is not what we should comment on in public, so let us proceed to the question as he posed it.

Bob should understand that life in 3D looks considerably different from life in the non-3D.

F: That’s been the theme-song here for many a year!

R: Yes, but not everybody has been listening in. and you don’t feel like giving a summary of the differences, so let me say a couple of things to be borne in mind as pillars of how we see things, not stopping to argue for their reality here.

First and foremost, no such thing as meaningless coincidence. Second, no such thing as 3D life without non-3D guidance, heeded or not. Third, “all is well, all is always well,” no matter how bad things get. Fourth, free will always, bounded within any given lived reality. And finally, absolute determination within any given path until one changes timelines, which is only possible because the mind is operating from non-3D (by non-3D rules) and connecting to the 3D body via brain and heart.

F: Hmm, that’s an interesting summary of the situation. I don’t know that you’ve ever put it just that way before.

R: Otherwise I could have asked you to summarize for us. You experienced it as feeling slightly lazy, but in fact you were feeling the brakes applied gently.

F: Interesting. And –?

R: Well, if you look at life in 3D as proceeding in that way, what happens has to look different. First, there can be no innocent victims, no suffering not chosen or accepted by the individual – but not necessarily within 3D awareness. As nothing can happen “for no reason,” so nothing can be suffered without recompense, though that recompense may not be obvious or even believable from 3D perspective.

So now if Bob looks back at his long difficult accompaniment of Karen with new eyes, things may begin to sink in that until now he has known only vaguely, or has only half-believed.

What if hers was a hero’s journey, and so was his? What great gift was ever given mankind without suffering? What ever increased individual consciousness more effectively than suffering? It is true that you can learn through joy – it is also true that learning through pain is the more accustomed route.

In a sense – in a sense, not “absolutely” – Karen and Bob may be seen to have entered this life in order to perform this journey, for themselves and for others. In a different sense, it may be seen as their being born into a time and place that had the potential – as they had the potential – to manifest such a journey, and the living-out of it was a series of decisions as to what to emphasize, what to accept, what to refuse. As always.

F: So it is the old story of the hero and sidekick? Frodo and Sam, say?

R: Yes except that from the freedom of non-3D, things are not seen from any one perspective. Yes it was Karen’s hero-journey, accompanied and assisted by Bob. But equally it was Bob’s hero-journey accompanied and assisted by Karen.

F: As I write that down, I can see it, but I don’t think I would have come to it, necessarily.

R: Life in greater dimensions is nothing if not the transcending of the single viewpoint. Everyone is the central figure of his or her own story, of course. What would make one arrangement of relative importance among them more true than another?

F: Yes, obvious now.

R: So as Bob looks at his life to date, he might look at it in (at least) two ways – from the point of view of his life as assistant to Karen’s, and from the point of view of his life as impacted by Karen’s. The two viewpoints will make much more sense when considered together than when considered separately.

So, he was her strong right arm, her determined support, her loving and anguished companion, as well as other things that should not be alluded to here. But he was also a man with his own ideas of what his life should be, should have been, couldn’t be, had to be, because of her situation. Taken together, those two viewpoints will form a complete picture and will give him all he needs to be going on with.

F: I notice that this came slower, today. In 50 minutes, 6.5 pages instead of the usual 8 or so. Yet I was not distracted. Is that meaningful?

R: What you mean is, where did the extra few minutes go – or, why weren’t there more words in the same given time. That isn’t anything to obsess over. Some things take longer and yet not obviously longer.

F: That sounds like a possible theme.

R: For another day? Perhaps. It depends upon the alternatives available. Not every side-trail is particularly worth pursuing.

F: Okay. I don’t feel like we have given Bob much information here.

R: To the contrary: We have given him a world of information in the only way it can be given. It is up to the individual to chew on the information given. What is spoon-fed comes to little. What is worked toward becomes part of those who work it – for of course what we have been saying here applies to everyone, not just to the person asking the question.

F: Well, if I ever had any doubt as to whether “I’m just making this up,” today’s session would be prime evidence that I’m not. It didn’t at all go where I thought it might. Always an interesting feeling. Thanks as always.