Rita on consciousness and us

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

6 a.m. I should write about John Tettemer, because the end of his journey as a religious speaks to our own condition, but it is not easily summarized or quoted, and I am still too headlong after all these years to be the careful scholar.

But I had half promised myself that we would pursue the first of two proposed subjects from yesterday’s session. Rita, you said we could discuss the nature of consciousness as experienced in 3D, and then maybe later we can discuss how evil intent manifests in the non-3D.

But don’t forget the lessons of John Tettemer’s life. Yes, it will require some work to set out, but it is work you are able to do, and it is exactly appropriate to our current situation – for you don’t think we are unconcerned with 3D struggles, surely, nor insulated from them – or why do you think it [his book] continued to surface in your life, most recently Monday night and most of Tuesday?

Well, I’ll try. (Yes, I know, “there is no try.”) So – communication in 3D.

All right. I suggest that for those for whom it is convenient, re-read the first paragraphs of yesterday’s message.

I’ll just slip them in here, courtesy of copy-paste.

[Rita, I woke up with a thought on the nature of evil, but I forgot what it was, because as soon as I formulated a question to ask you, I got a pretty definite concept in mind. Guidance in play, I take it: immediate answers to questions.

[Or you may choose to look at it as an example of you doing the work behind your own back. You think of a subject in a certain way, which poses or reveals a question. Then you go away, so to speak, doing other things. But the associating-machine continues to work the problem. Then, when you return to it, there is all the associated material ready for display. Magic.

[And as I was writing that out, I was hearing, feeling, all the questions about your explanation: the question of who was directing the “association machine” when my conscious mind was elsewhere, who was presenting the result, who was drawing my attention back to the subject in the first place.

[We can talk about the nature of consciousness as experienced in 3D, or we can set out your idea about evil.]

Fine. Here is the thing. As so often, when you look at something from an unfamiliar starting-place, you see it differently. It seems to change, because the context you suddenly (or gradually) see it in, changes. So you may look at something over years – our way of hearing what the guys were telling us, say – and it’s one thing to understand but a very different thing to see. And, as I say, that change may be a sharp insight or a gradual, perhaps imperceptible, transformation.

So, here. Describing this will do nothing. What will change things is for people to make the effort to grasp it, or, for the fortunate or the prepared, for it to suddenly seem to click on its own. It is not consciousness itself that seems to flicker and alternate and change condition. Consciousness is steady and perpetual. What flickers and alternates and changes condition is your connection to consciousness. And – if only you can really hear this – this is not mere playing with words! It is an entry-point to a fundamental readjustment, for those able to step through.

What you call unconscious life is really the life that goes on without you being conscious of it. There’s a huge difference!

I took a minute to reflect, and what came into my mind was something the guys told us years ago, and now I see I have forgotten it.

And there is your Exhibit A, that phenomenon of forgetting. Given that the memory is there to be retrieved (as, clearly, it is, else it would be lost and gone forever, whereas as you know so well, it resurfaces in its own good time), how can you forget it? What can forgetting be, but an interruption in the connection between the memory and your consciousness?

[Interruption]

We now resume our regularly scheduled program.

When you see that all reality is consciousness, that the world does not exist in a state of unawareness, that the ideas and memories don’t flicker in and out of existence, you realize that it is the 3D-only portion of life that experiences interruptions. But of course this sentence requires careful interpretation.

Which I can do, because the sense of it is clear to me, at least at this moment. We say “3D-only” and of course that means “life as we in 3D experience it,” not “life can be lived in 3D and not also in the rest of the dimensions” – as we have been at pains to demonstrate here.

Perhaps a better way to put it would be that while your consciousness is centered in 3D (because of the evidence of the senses), your awareness of the continuing beyond-3D environment that you do live in is what flickers or alternates or flees from you.

Life has a continuity of consciousness that may not be apparent from within the 3D pressure-cooker.

Your dreams, your recurrent reveries, the unexpected ways your memories may link up and reshape themselves, the many ways you “unconsciously” do things that fit nicely into the unsuspected future you eventually live – all these things and many more should serve as evidence that your conscious life proceeds continually, without disruption or interruption or possibility of either, always. But you may not be aware of it, because your own experience may identify with your

Got tangled there, but I know what you meant. We are like terminals at a time-sharing computer, or telephones at the end of a land-line, or, I don’t know, fill in your own analogy: The service itself continues uninterrupted, but your reception may be interrupted or disrupted.

Perhaps radio receiver is a better analogy. Even when you are still receiving, you may be receiving static as well as programming. The static was not intentionally broadcast. In fact, it was not broadcast at all. It is an interruption in quality, call it, between source and reception. But remember these are analogies, and analogies are not the destination but the bridge over difficulties. Don’t carry analogies too far or adhere to them too strictly. They are meant to help you make intuitive leaps. Consciousness is not radio, difficulties are not static.

Understood.

Well, yes, for the moment. The danger in analogies is that, providing images, they persist in memory beyond the words of explanation that qualify them.

So now, take whatever you have been taught or have taught yourself of psychology and invert it. Human 3D consciousness is not a peak above a general level of unconsciousness, but more like a pit, below the general level of consciousness. In a sense you could say that a cat or a tree or a stone is more consistently conscious than the flickering, alternating, unreliable form of consciousness you experience as “consciousness.” Yes, you can go higher, but you don’t live higher. You usually don’t live even at the level of consistency even of cats and trees and stones, that do not and cannot forget what they are, as you do.

So, Jung’s racial unconscious? (And I felt the prompting that led me to write that question.)

Here is the paradox that is worth exploring. To move in one direction, toward thinking, is to acquire the possibility of putting together bits of knowledge to provide a stable place to stand. To move in the other direction, toward intuiting, is to acquire the possibility of deepening your connection with the preexisting and often not-experienced continuity of consciousness that is a different kind of place to stand.

And to do both?

Ah, well,

That was odd. I got “Ah, well,” and then it was as if you were choosing among possible reactions and then deciding not to choose.

It’s just that over time one becomes so aware of the effect of an unconsidered word.

Which is all we have to work with here, words.

Yes, but I said “an unconsidered word,” and this is a different matter. I meant, the word that may be taken too weightily, as if more definitive than it really is.

You’re worried that it wouldn’t bear the weight people might place on it.

More or less. Anyway, let’s leave it as is: Ah, well –.

And I take it that’s it for the moment.

For the moment. But I would encourage you to do the work to tell John Tettemer’s story as it applies to our work. There may be no one else to do it.

All right, we’ll see. Till next time, then.