Rita — politics and us

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

F: 9 p.m. Well, Rita, your daughter Laurie, now known as Uri, asks me to ask you some political questions. An edited exchange of emails, omitting some personal stuff:

[Uri]:

Aloha Frank,

I have been reading some of your recent FB posts on Mom’s/Rita’s answers to your questions.

I went to your FB page to see what she had to say about the election, but could not find a reference to it. You must have asked.

Can you please tell me where to locate what she had to say?

[Frank]:

It never occurred to me to ask. Want me to? What about it should I ask? Not “who’s going to win,” because there are all those possible realities.

[Uri]

I wasn’t thinking about who is going to win….more like….

Is it worth trying to educate people about the various candidates actions both pro and con and how we or really I feel the consequences will be if each is elected?

Some of my students think that I should not be expressing my political options on FB. That it is unenlightened and that if it is “All Divine All the Time ” (one of my catch phrases) then shouldn’t we just have faith that it will all work out the way that it is meant to….

I tell my students that Gandhi meditated, prayed and protested and if he had not done the latter that India would still probably be ruled by the British…

Of course it will all work out the way that we collectively create it to but, what is the highest vibratory path?

[Frank]:

If Pope Francis feels okay with saying that Bernie is a moral politician, I don’t know why we shouldn’t. Treating unequal things as equals is not equity, it is selective blindness. Your students may need to reflect that the affairs of the 3D world cannot be neatly separated from “spirituality” without loss, don’t you think?

[Uri]:

Thanks for the response. I know you feel that way, you post things too:-)

But even Pope Francis (who is clearly the real deal 🙂  is still in a human body…

I was looking for a viewpoint from the other side if you still are willing to ask her..

My greatest stress is how can I go on living and paying taxes to the US government when they are so corrupt!!

If HRC or Trump does end up as president I am seriously considering retiring early or moving to another country that does not have a military. Costa Rica or Panama are on my short list. And either way living more simply…

 

F: Now, Rita, I know you were for Hillary Clinton in 2008, at least at the time you left the building in March, and long before that. It was a difference between us that neither of us belabored. I was pretty much alienated from politics anyway, though I did finally vote for Obama in the general election. I wonder, would you still be for her today, eight years later? You’d be 96, but I can’t see that slowing you down any, not mentally.

So, beginning where you please, your thoughts please on the subject of the presidential election process of 2016, in any context you choose.

R: No, better to do this tomorrow morning. Your work here isn’t lost; you’ve set it up and we can move right into it, but you will be fresher.

F: Okay. Tomorrow, then.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

5 a.m. I did the setting-up last night, and so, you’re right, none of that labor was lost, and we’re ready to start with your response. As I used to say when you and I used to talk to the guys and there would be a delay, I trust you’ve had time to get your cover story ready. J

R: I believe I have mentioned that I have a lot more sympathy for them now!

As you recognize, this skein of questions has many entry points. Let’s begin with the productive nature of 3D / non-3D interaction. It was to create and sharpen individual perception that the 3D was created. At least, that is one way it could be seen. The environment that creates the perception of separation in time and space is naturally an environment that sharpens inherent distinctions. Tacit or implicit divergences are there (in 3D) made spoken, explicit. You can’t help seeing the ways that you differ, far more clearly – or perhaps I should say more pointedly – than we in non-3D with its inherent bias toward interconnection.

F: I take that to mean that in non-3D, you never forget that every part of the vast interlinked mind is a part of something greater, a part of a whole, rather than something separate, as we often experience ourselves here.

R: You may remember the analogy we were given once of excess heat? If conducted smoothly and rapidly enough, excess heat does not burn but changes the average temperature of the surface involved. Otherwise, it heats one small area to excess, and burns it. Thus in non-3D, emotion like any other expression of awareness conducts automatically and smoothly, and so rather than any of us getting scorched, the energy is distributed and diluted and nothing is harmed. But in 3D there is the probability of a burn, along with the probability of greater awareness, brighter local consciousness.

F: That lesson is getting to be a long time ago here, and I doubt I could find it very easily – it’s probably in Sphere and Hologram somewhere – but I remember it well. A pretty helpful analogy, I thought. 

R: All right, so now apply that lesson to political questions and political partisanship, and social questions, and it will shed a new light on the whole “too spiritual to become involved in politics” question.

F: Meaning – we’re supposed to participate in life, and politics is part of life?

R: That isn’t wrong, but it isn’t careful.

F: That’s me.

R: It is when you gallop. Let’s pace. 3D existence is designed to bring into explicit existence the differences that exist equally in non-3D, but are far less explicit here because of our conditions in the non-3D.

Now remember – and it is easy to forget! But remember – the 3D and the non-3D are all part of the same greater reality. I call it the All-D sometimes when I wish to emphasize the commonalities between the two realms rather than point out the differences between them as usually is the case.

The 3D with all its affairs is not some separate freak show. It is not some lower realm filled with inadequate or unworthy beings. It is neither a punishment nor an irrelevance nor a detour. It is a – clarifying process, you might say, a workshop, a laboratory, a holographic projection through which we can work “what if” questions.

The things you like about 3D – the sunrises, the music, the compassion, the excitement – are as real but no more real than the things you don’t like.

F: No iteration of some things we don’t like. I sense there’s a reason why not. Which is?

R: I don’t want people distracted from the point. Start spelling out what people don’t like and you land in an argument, as you should well know.

F: All right.

R: So, my point here is that the 3D life cannot be irrelevant to the non-3D life, any more than (same statement) it can be irrelevant to the All-D life. 3D is the working-out, amid surroundings crafted to appear external and “objective,” of internal conflicts. It’s all internal; it is always internal. The 3D world may be looked at as a vast prop to help you see yourselves more clearly.

F: Yes, we’ve been through this before. I realize that not everybody who reads this will have been on that earlier trip, so to speak.

R: If everything that happens “around” you is part of your “internal” life, none of it can be irrelevant, and equally none of it can be uniquely important, even mandatory, except according to the individual.

F: We are all different bundles; we all have different priorities.

R: Exactly. If Picasso had devoted his attention to the politics of his country, his art would have been neglected, regardless whether he would have had an effect on the political world-stage. At the opposite extreme, if John F. Kennedy had lived his life as a scholar or journalist, he might have produced literature, but at the expense of leaving other work undone. No occupation or preoccupation is for everybody, nor for anybody at all times.

F: Which I take it means, if (and when) you are drawn to politics, nothing wrong with it, and if not, nothing wrong with that either.

R: How could there be? Your lives are yours to shape by decisions. That’s what you are there for! You do it by intent or by default, but you can’t help doing it.

F: And for Uri’s students who think it isn’t “spiritual” to have political opinions?

R: They are making the mistake – or perhaps we should say they are going through the phase – of separating what cannot really be separated. Find Gandhi’s “seven sins” and quote it to them.

F: I will if I can find it readily. It’s around here somewhere.

[Courtesy of the internet’s wonderful search features, Mahatma Gandhi’s seven sins: Wealth without work; Pleasure without conscience; Knowledge without character; Commerce without morality; Science without humanity; Religion without sacrifice; Politics without principle.]

R: Gandhi understood that politics is part of life and religion is part of life and that attempting to cut either one out of life results in dissociation.

F: All right, that’s very clear. Care to say anything about Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton, or either versus Donald Trump or whoever the Republicans nominate, or versus Jill Stein of the Greens?

R: The candidate that you find appealing, you find appealing because of congruencies between your image of the candidate and your inner being. Remember that “externals” in 3D are reflections to you of who you are or are not. They are objectified tendencies, embodied preferences, stylized representations, one might say.

If you can keep that elementary but often overlooked fact in mind while you act and (mostly) react politically, you will re-knit internal and external as far as you yourselves are concerned, and you will get the most benefit from the process.

F: I take that to mean – in my case, say – Bernie Sanders shows me what I value and would wish to encourage in society and, not necessarily noticed by me, also shows me aspects of myself as primarily seen reflected in the world.

R: You can learn no less from those dislikes that are equally strong in an election year. If you dislike Hillary Clinton, say, then ask yourself why, externally at first, and then apply that to your own inner life. What tensions and dislikes and fears is she acting as symbolic reference for? You see? And Trump no less. You have an opportunity to learn immense amounts about yourselves – and to do a good deal of healing, if you approach it right. But if you take it all as merely external, and allow yourselves to scorn and hate and leave it at that, you not only pass up a marvelous opportunity, you lose ground personally.

F: As I write that, for the first time I see the value in cloistered monks praying for the world, taking no external action.

R: You are never very far from your Catholic and priestly roots. It is part of your sculpted ability. [Meaning, I think, aspects that were deliberately included in my being for a purpose.]

F: It does give me a different vantage point.

R: It connects dots otherwise unnoticed.

F: Enough for today?

R: We can always do more another time.

F: Okay, our thanks as always.