Rita: Our lives as gift

Monday, September 25, 2017

5:25 a.m. I picked up my author’s copies of Awakening from the 3D World yesterday. That makes four volumes of transcripts, if we include Sphere and Hologram and the two volumes of Rita’s World. Another one finished and awaiting my review and an intro and conclusion – haven’t decided what to call it yet – and it looks like we’re in the process of producing yet another, at the moment.

That doesn’t mean they will sell, but at least I have done the work, first getting up and holding the sessions day by day – and typing them up – and sending them to my list, and putting them on my blog, and Facebook – and compiling them and proofreading and editing them – and setting them in order with preface and afterword. And I’ve done it alone. Without all that work – and it has been work! – nothing would be left of any of it. It would be vanished.

And without the help I got in getting Sphere and Hologram designed and typeset and published – Melynn Allen’s work – or getting the website set up – first Larry Giannou, then Rich Spees – same result, oblivion. Without Bob Friedman publishing Rita’s World and now Awakening from the 3D World, same thing. I would have to do that, too, and could do only a self-publishing version of the job. And then there are all the people who have encouraged me and given me feedback as I put the day’s take on the net day by day, without which I doubt I could have been able to continue –

Look at it one way, I did it all myself. Look at it another way, by myself I couldn’t have done it at all. Both true. probably both a model of our lives here. It is up to us to decide what to do, moment by moment, and then do it; but we live in a vast invisible way of support that we may disregard (“I’m a self-made man”) or recognize (“Thank God for my friends”). Equally true, which means, in both cases, only true in relation to one another, not true as absolutes.

I didn’t intend to spend that time writing up that thought. It sort of took over. Probably I’ll send it out anyway; it seems to apply.

So, your turn:

You are feeling pride in our accomplishment. Nothing wrong with basking.

Hi, Rita. I guess that’s why instead of proceeding, I browsed the introduction [of Awakening from the 3D World] and re-read the conclusion, huh? To put me in mind of you?

You could just as easily put it the other way round, and say I haunted you, putting it in your mind to pick up the new book, so you would turn your attention from what you expected – another talk with your mystery guest – to what was on our slate, a visit from your old landlady.

Smiling. And now I see why I was moved to think back on all the work we’ve done. The primary person I didn’t mention – not the only one, but the primary one – was you, of course. But I doubt you are here for the purpose of getting your film credits.

No, but our case is an example of how little we know our life’s shape ahead of time. We didn’t meet until I was already 80 years old and bored with life. Who knew what lay ahead?

Technically we met when you were 78, but I know what you mean. We didn’t really begin to interact until 2000.

And we did those sessions, and more in 2004, and they didn’t seem to come to anything in terms of the outside world beyond the [Monroe Institute-oriented] Voyagers Mailing List and our own friends. And then they did, on the path (or in the version) in which you did the work. And because you did the initial work, the path was open for us to work together in this new way over the past three years, and it continues to stretch ahead as a possibility. But the intellectual work could not have been accomplished without the other work which was not work but a natural joy, and how shall we describe it?

I know what you’re talking about. In a way you could say we were taking care of each other. You were mothering me, I was the dutiful affectionate son you never had.

That emotional trust and intellectual and spiritual companionship laid the basis for what we did, because as you know, these things proceed not from intellect alone (where they may easily turn rancid) but from the heart.

Where there is trust, there is no room for fear, for one thing.

Yes, but more, where there is trust, there is assurance, there is a sense of being guided. Almost the same as what you just said, but not quite.

And there was your lifetime of practical knowledge and your habit of intellectual inquiry that shaped our sessions, for they weren’t questions that would have occurred to me. We were a good team.

And you have another now.

Nancy [Ford], you mean. Yes. She has accompanied me in the same way you did intellectually, though everything else was different.

Well, so is that what we’re doing here today, Old Home Week?

Remember, at least as important as any information you bring through is your encouragement of others to do their own equivalent thing. So the more glimpses behind the scenes they get, the more they realize, you are just another guy, just as you say but they don’t always hear. Of course, you are but you aren’t. What distinguishes you is that you do the work; you follow where it leads; you are willing to serve. But that should encourage, too, for that is a decision open to anybody to take. It’s up to them.

Yes, it is a little disconcerting, sometimes, to see some people regarding me as if I were something special. A nice corrective to all the people who think I’m nothing much!

But to stick to the point: Everybody’s circumstances surround them, obviously, and since their own circumstances (their own unimportant boring surroundings, the flat and unprofitable details of their lives) cannot match anybody’s they read about, whether it’s your life or anybody else they’re interested in, the temptation is to say “I’m nobody and I can’t expect to really do anything.” And of course that is wrong.

The fallacy of insignificance, somebody called it.

Your own life always looks relatively flat and humdrum in a way, even when it also feels exciting and even dramatic, because you yourself are at the center of it, and so where is the room for the drama of the unfamiliar? But drama is not a sign of significance any more than heartburn would be. Your own judgment of your life is unlikely to be an accurate one, because you cannot usually get any perspective on it. But if you are doing your best, and are living your truest impulses, and are following where it leads, how can you be wasting your time even if it feels like putting in time is all you are doing? The mother raising her children may feel like the days are going by without anything in it for her; that doesn’t mean that is the judgment she will come to when she looks back on her life as a whole.

If our readers don’t realize that that paragraph was aimed directly at them, well – I’m pointing it out.

There is an aspect to pioneering that perhaps they have never considered, and that is that your own true path is never obviously important, never obviously the path to significant achievement internal or external. It usually looks like “mere everyday stuff.” When you come to know that “mere everyday stuff” – speaking primarily internally – is the gold, your life will change, or rather your appreciation of your life will change. Everybody has a unique gift to offer the world, and of course “the world” does not mean “the 3D world only.” I trust that we have made it clear by now that there really isn’t any “3D world only.” No two gifts are identical, any more than any two gift-givers are identical, so while you may use models for your conduct, use them as models of character, not as models of circumstance.

I know what you’re meaning there, but that doesn’t quite say it. I think you mean, don’t expect your life, your gift, to resemble anyone else’s. It’s one thing to admire and imitate Lincoln’s virtues, say, but it wouldn’t be much use to expect to be president and sign the Emancipation Proclamation, or to mourn the fact that you couldn’t.

Nobody’s life is identical to anybody else’s, and nobody’s is redundant or insignificant. You know what Bob [Monroe] said.

“You do the best you can.”

I don’t know what more anybody could do.

No. Well, thanks for this unexpected pleasurable visit. You doing all right?

I could ask the same of you, and the answer would be the same.

Yes it would. Okay, Miss Rita, thanks and our love to you, and maybe we’ll talk to you again some time. I used to say “talk to you later,” and you used to say, “talk to you soon,” but it came to the same thing. Be well, always.

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