We were in the process of explaining how the newly ex-3D soul experiences and redefines itself as it gets oriented.
Yes. There is a need for such description, you understand, in that so many older ways of imagining it no longer speak to people, because they are ready and able now for more sophisticated explanations. You know that Bob [Monroe] was always saying our job is to turn our beliefs into knowns. But that isn’t so easily done, and the hardest step, in a way, is realizing that what we think is a known may be really only a belief.
So if people believe in science and believe that science has established certain things that mean that materialism is the only rational conclusion a thinker can draw, you are not going to be able to get them to think their way out of that box unless you (or life) can persuade them that the logical underpinnings do not hold. A world-shaking experience may do it – an NDE, say, or, as in my case, significant experiences during a Gateway. Or, a silent unconscious following of internal promptings may lead to a slow rejection of previously accepted ideas and their replacement by more alluring ones.
One way or another, new beliefs may supplant old, or new openness may supplant older rootedness. The “how” of it is not predictable and not particularly worth examining for clues as to how it may be spread more widely. That isn’t your job, nor anyone’s. People’s reorientation may safely be left to themselves; everybody has guidance that will work with them in ways no outside influence could equal in skill or perseverance.
But you have to keep in mind, the times demand (or you might equally say, allow) different people for different eras. It is a reciprocating process, as you like to put it. Beliefs shape minds and minds shape cultures and cultures shape beliefs and beliefs shape minds, forever.
A new civilization comes into being by altering what people believe, which alters what they experience, which alters what they do and what they want done. That is as true a way of looking at history as thinking the reorientations come about somehow at random, and certainly as true as thinking that each new stage of civilization is the result of “progress” in any absolute sense, rather than progression, which is not the same thing.
Now, none of this is a detour or a side-trail. It is important for every person who is reading this or ever will read this, because one of the most important concepts they need to absorb is that “the way the world is” is the most efficient prison ever constructed, but the door of the cell has the key on the inside!
Vivid metaphor.
You don’t move people by argument or by intellectual understanding alone. You do it by vivid images, easily grasped, easily remembered. The complication is that you also move people by a vivid image who haven’t heard, or wouldn’t have been able to follow, the arguments leading to the more sophisticated understanding. So in their case they have traded in one belief and drawn another belief from the deck. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that – people are too quick to criticize the way the world maintains itself – but recognize, that is a very different situation.
A belief snatched at is a superstition, as opposed to a belief grown into?
In the absence of internal guidance that would be a true enough description. Let’s say rationality plays a smaller part in people’s mental world than they sometimes think it does – and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is often their saving grace, leading them to act better than their conscious beliefs would lead them to.
All right. I’m a little at sea as to where we’re going, here.
Surely you don’t think that what the ex-3D soul’s experiences as it reorients itself is unaffected by the beliefs that shaped it in its 3D years, do you?
[Pause] Meaning – so be careful what you let yourself believe?
No, not at all. You won’t have all that much control over what you find yourself believing. Meaning, so maybe there is a purpose to the creation of various environments for 3D life. Maybe the creation of certain environments allows the formation of certain types of minds, and maybe the existence of different belief-systems in the 3D minds that result are valued in and for themselves.
I’m sitting here pretty much in neutral, trying to grasp so many implications. One of them is – our 3D experiences are meant to help shape or reshape the non-3D environment.
That’s correct. The 3D isn’t just an amusement park.
And that implies that the non-3D feels a need for 3D-shaped souls with certain biases, for some reason.
How often do people go to so much trouble to build something, if they don’t expect to profit from it? I don’t mean milk it, but get some good out of it?
That’s sure not the way we’re accustomed to thinking of it – either this world or the next world.
No, and look how “the next world” has gone dead on you. It doesn’t inspire, it doesn’t seem real and comprehensible. So, we’re doing our bit to alleviate the symptoms by addressing the causes of a sense of meaninglessness. But you can’t expect new understandings to spread in an instant. Well, you can, in a sense: People sometimes catch new understandings like wildfire, but don’t expect it to be a rational process.
— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.