Rita — it’s like breathing

Monday, September 11, 2017

11:15 a.m. I am tempted to try a session with Rita, but I don’t know. Seem to have recovered from last night. Rita, what do you think?

On the one hand, you don’t ever have to do a session (and, for that matter, you could wind up depending on the process too much, as we have said). On the other hand, it seems to make you feel better, so there isn’t any physical reason (energy depletion, that is) not to. It’s always your choice.

Well, I have the very ragged end of a realization that came to me yesterday or Saturday, that I stupidly didn’t write down. I expect you know, though.

The insight wasn’t fully formed – which made it harder to retain because it didn’t have natural “hooks” to other material – but the essence of it was that being confined to 3D (in your awareness, of course) and being released from it is the equivalent to breathing in and out, which is why it is difficult for people to get the sense of the interplay: It would be like trying to understand life as if it were composed of one inhale, or one exhale. What kind of sense could anybody make of that? If one exhale were taken to be the entirety of a life, or one inhale – how could it make any sense? The very essence of breathing – the alternation of inhaling and exhaling, would have been defined out of the scope of investigation!

Thus your recent emphasis on 3D and non-3D being part of All-D, hence not separate, hence not separable.

Yes. To consider the afterlife as if it were a one-time thing, or a life in 3D as one-time, removes any obvious and necessary connection between the two, and encourages considering them as unconnected except in sequence, as if you boarded a train in Ohio and got off in New York.

Not sure that analogy will get through, but let’s assume so.

Once you remember that the All-D is one world, and that compound beings exist in the All-D always, not now and then, it is easier to proceed to see 3D life as an alternation with beyond-3D-constraints life. And that should tell you that the 3D-and-beyond-3D process has a purpose, has its own nature. I keep saying, you live in one world, not two. Only, the 3D life you perceive is not all there is. You can learn to perceive the rest, and many do, and your life changes. That is, the quality of the conscious life you lead changes. And that is a desirable development.

When I think of how many people live lives haunted by the specter of death, when I think how people consider death a tragedy even though every one of us is going to die, it is overwhelming. I think of Hemingway, obsessed by his premonition that he would commit suicide, decades before he had any idea why he would. And I think of the absolute reflex many people have – if someone dies, it is a tragedy. So Scotty Crossfield [famous X-15 test pilot of the 1950s] dies piloting his own small aircraft and he is in his 80s (I think it was) and he died doing something he loved, and the news media refers to the “tragedy.” For Christ’s sake, does that mean we are supposed to go out in nursing homes? Actually, I suppose it means we aren’t supposed to die at all, it’s too final.

Feel better now?

Yeah, I heard you getting ready to say that before I finished writing the last graf. I’m smiling too. So, to return to the inhale-exhale analogy –

Perhaps we could do with a third state, between the two. I suppose we might think of it as the equivalent of holding your breath, only I trust that people will remember that analogy is always limited, and cannot be extended indefinitely.

Many people have reported seeing people in the afterlife doing this or that, and the descriptions are far-ranging. Bob [Monroe] described the belief-system territories, that Bruce Moen called “hollow heavens,” and clearly these are extensions of what the 3D personality envisioned (or perhaps merely desired to experience, even knowing they are somewhat unreal). Others, as your Bob [Friedman] pointed out, return with elaborate descriptions of people living lives equivalent to 3D life. And of course there are unnumbered varieties of description. Consider: Perhaps these are all pauses, intermissions in the on-going play. Holdings of breath between inhale and exhale.

Interesting thought. That would tend to give those accounts a suitable place in your inhale-exhale construct. But, say more on the construct itself.

Well, consider the situation. We have said that you in 3D think yourselves in 3D only, yet that is impossible. If there are six dimensions, you are in six regardless how many you do not realize that you experience. And it is equally true of us you think of as in non-3D. We haven’t moved; we haven’t changed worlds, only changed status. Thus we, like you, are in all six dimensions. (This is analogy. We are not saying reality has X dimensions, because dimensions are but an abstraction. Still, that is the wording you are accustomed to hear.)

You and we inhabit the same world, the only world there is. (And I trust that by now readers will not be tempted to read “world” and think we mean a planet.) While your awareness is centered on 3D, the world seems to you one way. When your awareness is freed from that constraint (so to speak), it appears another way. But it is the same world. Is it any wonder that you and we interact?

We think of such interaction mostly in terms of ghosts, I suppose.

Or angels, or divine guidance, or providential interventions, or in many other ways, not necessarily obvious.

All right.

Doesn’t your life look different if you see it as one breath in a far greater life? There is nothing trivial about any one breath, as an asthmatic ought to know, but one breath does not give any idea of the greater life it contributes to.

It has only been about 40 minutes, but I think we ought to stop here. It has a sort of time-to-pause-and-think-about-it feel.

Very good, and we’ll see you soon.