Rita on units and communities after death

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

5:15 a.m. All right, Rita, you were going to address Paul’s remarks today. [My brother Paul had said, “In this context the quest for Smallwood’s historical reality looks entirely different, doesn’t it? Your Smallwood might have been some combination of Life A2 and Life 87, not a figure to be verified in our historical records.”] Meanwhile this was posted in an email to me yesterday.

[Ramona: At the beginning of Chasing Smallwood you mention not being able to find a historical record of Joseph despite being able to follow other tracks of information about his experiences. On and off I study The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune (in very small bites); the edition I have has an after-thoughts section.

[It says: … “When a human dies portions of the astral and etheric bodies are probably lost for a awhile to his Individuality, but also they often go to make up certain parts of the new astral and etheric bodies he will have in his new incarnation. … form is broken up and parts are carried on to build up the form of the next type of life-form, but it is not always known that particles of the denser vehicles-not the physical, but the astral and etheric – the astral and etheric bodies of people who have died, go to make up other Personalities.”

[“These Personalities may belong later to those Individualities from whose former Personalities the parts come, but it also happens they may not, and Individualities often have Personalities composed of material which previously has been used in the vehicles of others. This sometimes can account for strange reactions between people in incarnation, so that it is not always necessary to look to meetings in previous lives to explain such reactions. … Life in its many-sidedness is not simple by any means, it is woven into a vast pattern.”

[So, I was pondering all this in relation to your brother’s question of Smallwood being combinations rather than verifiable figure?]

[Rita:] Can you see now – I know you can, Frank, but this is a semi-rhetorical question for others – can you see why seemingly simple questions do not get simple answers? “What is it like in the afterlife?” “Do souls survive death?” “Is reincarnation correct as a concept or not?” Seemingly, such questions ought to be able to be answered by a yes or a no. In fact, though, any answer that will even somewhat tell the truth about the situation must be complicated, in that it must cover so much unsuspected background, and must be sure that the explanation is not distorted by unexamined assumptions.

In practice, the explanation must differ almost person by person.

That’s correct, because everyone’s particular set of assumptions and experiences will differ. But of course it is not possible to tailor explanations to that degree in any fixed form such as text. Advanced teaching and learning can come only one-on-one, face to face. Fortunately, people have intuition to guide them, or nothing could be conveyed at all, ever.

A good thing religions have fixed creeds, huh? And schools have fixed curricula? And groups have fixed sets of understandings?

Yes, very funny, but of course in practice such things are necessary in any group work. A group attempts (whether conscious of the fact or not) to hold the middle, the lowest common denominator. Its tenets

Lost it. Thought I could get the thread back by waiting, but it does not reappear.

Our dialogue format gives you the opportunity to hand over to me, which restores the flow. An advantage of this particular way of doing things, though certainly not the only way to do it. I was merely pointing out that any group has a core, a common set of values and beliefs, that more or less holds it together. It is very much “one size fits all” in that no size fits any exactly. But it is not in groups that learning occurs, but one by one. The spark is not conveyed en masse, but singly. There is more to be said on that subject, but that is enough for now. For now, it is a side-trail.

All right, but don’t people necessarily learn one by one even reading our sessions?

It is the difference between reading about something and experiencing it. But you mustn’t tempt me from the point of today’s discussion. We’re about a third of the way through the allotted time already.

All right.

The two comments work together nicely, better than either does alone. The common point is an understanding of the fact that you are not the units you appear to be. In a way this goes back to our first sessions with the guys, but in a way it is almost a new development in that it concentrates not on how you were constructed but on how your future existence is constructed.

I was blank on the implications, but I am beginning to see them.

Which fact itself is an example of direct learning – via your non-3D connections – as opposed to indirect learning via reading or listening to literature, etc. Getting it directly, you have things that can’t necessarily be said, and then your task is to be sure you have it in its least distorted form. (Your own peculiar circumstances and background will always predispose you to see things a certain way, not always to the benefit of your understanding.)

For convenience sake, and as shorthand statements peripheral to other discussions, it has served to think of strands as themselves more or less unvarying. So if you have a  “past life” strand – Smallwood, say, Frank – it has been easy to think of it as a unit rather than remember that all units are communities of units at another level. So now we step beyond that shorthand, to look a little more closely.

If I am receiving correctly, I get that into the making of every new soul may come bits and pieces of other souls, or may come other souls entire, or both.

It is very difficult to make a statement that will be accurate for everybody and for all time, because the same words will mean different things to different people. In practice, we wind up saying “more or less.”

Try to hold various elements of the situation in mind. There is a continuity to Life A that, necessarily, is over and above Life A’s consciousness. So, Life A isn’t the unit we may have to think of it as – but we do have to think that way if we are to get a sense of the situation; then we have to nuance our way beyond our initial understandings.

The process goes on forever.

It does. You’ll never be bored by understanding everything.

Very reassuring. Okay, and –?

Because that continuity pre-exists and over-arches (so to speak) Life A, Life A is able to be mingled with elements from other Lifes, and vice versa.

It is all contained within Sam anyway.

Yes – only don’t go thinking that Sam is an indivisible unit itself.

Sigh. As above, so below. But it’s like we never get anything settled for good and all; everything turns out to be a steppingstone.

That’s quite right. And forever, as far as I can see. But you aren’t chasing your tail. You are building scaffolding to achieve higher perspectives. It is the perspective that is important, not the scaffolding in and of itself.

So in effect some of my traits may be combined with traits of Smallwood, say, or of anybody else in Sam’s repertory cast of characters?

The difficulty is to hold in mind at the same time individuality and communal existence. Individual minds make up the part of the non-3D world that deals with 3D. But Sam as a whole, and the larger beings of which Sams are a part, may also be considered to be Lifes of a different order of magnitude. See it only one way, and you will gain in certainty. See it both ways, or alternatively one way and another, and you will gain sophistication of understanding. There is always a tension there.

As sometimes happens, I am scratching my head, wondering if we actually said something this session.

That is because you are still inside the temporary group mind that ILC forms, and so it looks too obvious to be anything new. Take a look later and it will look different.

I suppose. Okay, is there more you want to say at the moment?

This will do for now. Further questions on the subject may elicit more at a different time.

Okay, thanks.