A step beyond (4)

Summary of a PREP session in the Bob Monroe Lab at TMI held Tuesday morning, May 25, 2004, Skip Atwater at the controls, Rita Warren at the microphone, Frank in the black box.

The problem of anxiety

I usually assume that what are problems for me may be problems for others. Here is a big example. Rita asked for the best way to help me deal with my concern about perhaps being wrong about facts, particularly times and places.

TGU: “It’s not so much that he minds being wrong, but he’s afraid that if we’re wrong, it means we don’t exist, [laughs] in other words, that we’re a figment of the imagination. So when we give opinions he’s fine with that, because it’s just an opinion and nobody can verify or counter-verify it. He knows, intellectually, that the best psychics are 80 percent accurate, which means 20 percent inaccurate, but he still worries about the implications if we get something wrong.” They advised, “Just do the session. You may have to sometimes redundantly ask in different parts of a session, because sometimes what’s not available at one time will be available when he loosens up at another time. We would say most of the time it has worked out better when you push a little.”

Past lives and threads

Rita wondered what I meant in saying I felt a connection to Columba. They explained that I had felt the weight of responsibility he had borne, and the faith that he had leaned on, that allowed him to bear that responsibility weightlessly. The strength of the connection had made me suspect that this was another life, but the fear of psychic inflation had made me back away from it. Pursuing this question, they spelled out the difference between the concept of “past lives” and that of resonance along a given thread. The mor threads given individuals shared, the stronger the bond.

“Frank and Bertram and Columba and Joseph certainly share a bundle of bundles of threads, connected around healing and spiritual development and on-going connection with the other side. In other words, if you have someone who has a strong interest in healing, that particular thread may be associated with threads of connection with the other side, as in Frank’s case, in which case you have someone who becomes a spiritual healer. Or that thread may be connected with ambition and with mechanical ability and with intellectual acuity and other things, and you may have someone who becomes a surgeon. Surgeons and faith-healers and energy-workers and general practitioners, and, oh, dentists or whatever have in common certain threads, and those threads are bundled with other threads which make them very different. So your threads that run through your lives both connect and by combinations of them, differentiate.

“So, when you look at Columba and you look at Frank, it will seem to you they share a good deal of the essence of the other, which is why it looks like a reincarnated being. Someone who shares significant bundles that were in a different person will resemble that person in many ways and yet have differences. It’s very difficult to discuss this topic, because everything we say is a little bit unavoidably distorted. He should paint this! He could paint this idea, or draw it.”

[I did paint it, with their assistance, envisioning “individuals” as spools connected by threads. Of course the painting, like their examples, is simplified to the point of distortion for the sake of clarity. Rather than two or three threads emanating from a spool, there should be hundreds, thousands – millions, the guys say – but how could I paint that, and if I were able to, how could anyone make sense of it? This will have to do as a sort of visual short-cut.]

They reminded us that they think of individuals as a convenient fiction. “So the simple answer to your question becomes, just follow the ones that seem most appropriate. There’s a reason why they will seem most appropriate. It’s another example of the fact that what to do is always right there. You never have to go across the world to find what’s to do next, it’s always right there for you.”

“Now, if we go back to our analogy of hollow spools holding threads, you can see that it will be easier for you to follow 40 threads rather than one thread, if the 40 all go to the same place. There are two ways to be close, and one way is your external circumstance. Your culture provides common threads.” So, a life might be easily accessible because it was lived relatively nearby in time and space. Or it might be easily accessible because of similar internal characteristics, such as interests, or temperament, or experience, or aspirations. “A highly scientific, artistic mathematician today might find many more resonances with the life of Christopher Wren, say, or Roger Bacon, than with someone much closer in time and space.”

[From here on, transcript rather than synopsis. Compression is beyond me at the moment]

 

Bertram, Joseph, Clio, Senji

Rita: “It seemed, when we talk about Bertram, that the connections there were with the church, with the healing theme. Are those–?”

TGU: “Well, Bertram’s prime motivator was a desire to be a saint. Not to be sainted externally, but to he wanted to live a holy life. He wanted to come as close as he could while in a body to living everyday life, as he would put it, `with God or in the presence of God’; as you might put it, `with an active awareness of the other side, and the parts of himself that extend to the other side.’ An awareness and a willingness to do the work. He was not primarily interested in being a healer. He was primarily interested in being a monk, in being a –. You hardly have words for it today. He wanted to live a holy life, we’ll just come back to that again. That was the biggest bundle of threads, let’s put it that way. Therefore, anything that he touched, such as healing, or such as the priesthood or such as counseling people, would have stemmed from that primary orientation toward holiness. Bertram never would have considered himself a healer. Anyone that he healed, he said to himself, `not me, but Christ in me,’ meaning, he brought forth the energy; he acted as a conduit for the energy, for the grace. He never confused himself with the source of the energy, the source of the grace. It’s a way of being you can hardly conceive of in your time.”

Rita: “He has mentioned two others who are not in this fairly recent time sequence. One, Joseph the Egyptian, and one, Clio. Can you mention what kinds of connections might be there.”

TGU: “The Egyptian monk — whose name, you must realize, is not Joseph, but it means Joseph, and that’s easier for you as English-speakers — lived in an integral society. There was no contradiction in that society. It all flowed together. Therefore he had a space, the others had a space. Their lives were like a  ballet in a way that you can’t imagine, because they all functioned harmoniously. They functioned harmoniously because they were functioning out of what can only be called a common consciousness, although they didn’t share group mind. The awareness of themselves as individuals that were not part of a social matrix was almost non-existent, whereas your civilization is almost at the other end of that spectrum. They primarily saw themselves as a part of an uninterrupted wholeness. Joseph as a priest lived his life without contradiction, so that his everydayness was a connection with the eternal. This of course is very good reinforcement for Bertram and Columba and Frank and others on those same bundles of threads. The theological opinions of Joseph would no more agree with Bertram or Frank than either of those with each other. But the experience was basically the same experience, and the differences in those experiences – the different threads – were primarily cultural, involving not only usage, practice, ritual, but also the differences in a person that are the result of that person growing up in a society and taking that as his primary reality. Don’t know a better way to put that.

“There was Clio, a young boy who was trained to be a diviner in fire. Now, this was in Rome at the time of the Vesuvius explosion at Pompeii. This boy had the threads that were a certain purity of person and of intent, but all of the cultural threads of course were different, and what you might call threads of opinion were different. He was not a Christian, nor was he as Joseph was nor as Frank is. (And by the way the Christianness of Columba and the Christianness of Bertram were not identical either, again because of cultural threads.) Clio lived in a society almost more like modern America than like medieval England, or Egypt. [That is, it was essentially secular.] The divining in fire had its obeisances to the gods, but it was primarily a secular, utilitarian pursuit, and it was only his own mystical inclinations that made his life as transparent as it became.

“We would remind you, and Frank, who had forgotten, of the monk in Japan in the 1500s, who spent his entire life following empty ritual, not knowing the internal reality of that ritual because those who taught him had forgotten the internal reality. Here was a man who lived his whole life and died assuming that he had wasted his life, and assuming there was nothing, and was pleasantly surprised to wake up and to find that what he had been taught was true, but the meat of the matter did not resemble the empty shell. When he woke up he realized that he had been taught everything from a deadness rather than from the livingness. That served as a very good reminder and counterpoint. (He sometimes thinks of it as a joke, in a way.) The threads that he shares with them, you see, are the same aspiration. What he does not share with them is, he had no knowledge, really. He had no one to give him knowledge. And therefore he had no on-going experience, because he couldn’t get the experience. But the way that he profited was, he did try, until he finally gave up in his early fifties, and died. But he did try, and that was where the benefit came. But he didn’t know anything. It’s a good counterpoint to these others who do know something, you see? And the reason he is one of the threads of Frank’s bundle is that Frank is more in the sense of someone who didn’t know anything who’s learning it again, and that’s what he has in common with the monk. Don’t ask us his name. Names are very difficult.” [A bit later on, before answering another question, they said, “By the way, the monk in Japan was named Senji,” which of course was the name I had gotten back in 1987, but had long forgotten.]

Threads and bundles

“Perhaps we can use this as a teaching example. Now, take again Frank as the current hollow spool holding threads. You can perhaps see now how we use the combinations of the threads to produce what looks to you to be an individual. Everything within you is being held together momentarily by your body and psyche. But you don’t own it; you are a collection of it! And those threads proceed beyond you, as well, and others will use this and that thread. You see?”

The threads extend backwards and forwards in time, which means we can move along the thread and find someone who lived (the way we look at it) earlier or later than ourselves.

“This is one of the ways in which you serve the wholeness of things. You add your own conscious awareness to what happens when you mix all these threads. That conscious awareness is then available for others.”

Beyond that, we you can move along a thread to a different individual, and, because that other person’s bundle also contains different threads, we can jump threads and move to places we couldn’t get to otherwise, because our own bundle doesn’t have that thread.

“If for hollow spools filled with threads, you now substitute our previous analogy of crystals, it’s the same thing. And you may remember that a long time ago in your time, we talked to you about how everything  is a crystal and there’s no movement. You might say the whole thing is one big pattern of woven threads and there’s no movement. But your movement of consciousness along it determines what you experience. It’s vastly more complicated than this, but you know we’re trying to give you something that’s in your four dimensions plus in every different reality plus every different possibility, and the complexity of it can’t be portrayed, because there is no physical analogy that could be drawn that would be complex enough.”

Rita asked what happens when the physical body dies.

TGU: “Well, that’s what we would call crystallization in a way. Your physical body has died, your consciousness is unable to continue to hold these threads together within space-time. Therefore what has been, is, but it’s no longer in space-time. The bundle doesn’t cease to be bundled, but it doesn’t manifest in space-time anymore, because the body that held it together is dead. Now, someone could, if they wished, create another bundle with more or less the same threads, and that might look like a reincarnation of the previous bundle. But you can see now that it really is not, it’s more like a recreation than a reincarnation.”

Rita: “So the recreation would have the same elements in it.”

TGU: “Well, we’re saying, if you did choose the same elements, it would be more like trying to copy a picture than it would be paining a new picture. Occasionally it’s done. Supposing you took all of the physical, mental, spiritual, and intellectual characteristics of a given bundle. Let’s say you took Columba, and you took everything that one could take, and pulled all those same threads together in a bundle, but you put that bundle elsewhere in time and space. By definition it’s going to be different, because it’s elsewhere in time and space. It will have threads in it that were not and could not have been in Columba’s bundle. And conversely there will be threads of his that will not be able to be brought to you, primarily the cultural ones. Now, is that reincarnation, or is that a re-creation according to thread? It depends on how you care to look at it.

“Someone else may also use the same bundles of threads from Columba. Now, has he then reincarnated twice? Well, yes. And are the two of them perhaps in the same town in the same day on the same day, so to speak? Yes, sure, why not? So this explains perhaps to you why someone can seem to have reincarnations that are simultaneous. Many people have been perplexed by that. In the first place it is not a re-using of physical material, there’s plenty to go around, but in the second place, what you are doing is recreating conditions, in a much stronger way than you might be said to be passing on something as you would pass it on genetically. Again, the major thing that is unavoidably distorting everyone’s view of reincarnation is that you come to it from the point of view of individuals as being integral, rather than constructs. That’s the single biggest thing that distorts your understanding of the process.”

Rita: “I want to follow up a little bit more on what happens at the death of the physical body. What is the nature of the bundle that is carried on, on the other side?”

TGU: “The bundle exists, as it always does exist outside of time. You know, you could look at it like you wired together this bundle with all these threads and as soon as you did that, everything that was in it was manifest, because any possibilities that could be manifested, are manifested, and from outside of time and space, it looks like, it just is. When you in time and space go through it, you go through it a time-slice at a time, and it looks to you like it becomes, and because you don’t see the alternate choices, you feel like it’s a choice that either becomes this or becomes that. Well, intellectually you know that in fact it becomes both. Now we’re asking you to expand a little farther and realize, it didn’t become anything, nothing became. The universe was and the universe is. And in the creation of those bundles was the creation of all the possibilities. That’s why we say to you that nothing moves. We know that your experience of it is that everything moves from past to future. But in actual fact, everything is, and you’re moving your consciousness up and down and around, and exploring things, and that’s fine. That’s what you should be doing. But that isn’t the same as saying that things really move just because they seem to move.”

Rita: “Okay, that’s a good reminder. I think I’m not finished with questions on that area, but I’m going to stop that for now.”

TGU: “Well you’re not straining our patience, if that’s what worries you.” [laughs]

Rethinking reincarnation

Rita: “I’m straining for better ways to formulate a question to get at what I’m trying to do here. So I think I will just ask–. One very specific thing that came up last time had to do with the presence in the group to which we’re speaking of all of these energies represented by the past lives of Frank. All of these are represented in the group of guys, as I understood you.”

TGU: “Mm-hmm. Well, maybe, at any given moment. It just depends on what threads we follow, you know.”

Rita: “Okay, well, I had initially been conceiving that in a very limited way; those individuals that Frank had felt particular connections with. But are you saying that all the many hundreds, thousands, whatever there were, of other lifetimes are also represented? “

TGU: “No, we’re saying that you’re still attempting to understand this as if all these individuals that you’re talking about were real, and we’re saying that they’re not. If you will look at this as a network, a lattice, of interconnected hollow spools that hold together threads, you will see that everything that’s connected to Frank – and of course that’s ultimately everything, but some are closer than others – is on tap, so to speak, whenever you want to activate it. So if you ask a question and the question involves modern art, you can get an answer about modern art. If you—if he – if we –. Hold on a minute. See, there are some other things coming up and we’re trying to decide whether to talk about them or not. One of the things is –.”

There was a pause, and then I said, “Heh! Rita, I’m sitting here by myself now! [laughs] All of a sudden the whole crew went away. Maybe they’re in a funk.”

She said, “Or maybe they’re making decisions, who knows?”

Me: “But they’re not in time, why should they need any time to think?”

Rita: [laughs]

Me: “I’m not entirely joking about that.”

Rita: “Yeah, well, just relax there for a moment.”

Me: “Yeah, I will, but it was really funny, like all of a sudden, nobody home. [yawns] [pause]

Skip and Rita changed the Hemi-Sync to bring me to Focus 21, which brought me back within earshot, so to speak.

Rita: “You had been reminding us that when we look at the energy once it’s moved out of the physical, out of time and space, that we still have the process going on of the spool and thread analogy….”

TGU: “Well, we were just saying it’s not entirely a mistake, but it’s not very productive, to think of your life (whoever is the subject at the moment) as connected to x number of other lives, and you want to know are there 17 or 750 or 7500 or whatever. The productive thing is for you to follow threads.

“You’re looking at the connection between Frank and Bertram, and there are several very thick cables, like, of threads that connect the two. And others that go off in other directions for each of them. This is true for everybody that you’ll ever encounter, so when you say, `okay Frank, we want to talk to the guys,’ the subject matter that you want to talk about will determine who is or isn’t talking, and who is or isn’t talking will change unpredictably, and usually undetectably to you, as the session proceeds. Because, it’s not a matter of a person at a microphone. It’s more a matter of Frank reaching out, going down a thread, and getting what’s on that thread, and then the next question, down a different thread. This is terribly wrong, but that might give you a little idea of it. So when you say, `are all past lives that he’s aware of connected to the guys,’ the answer is `yes obviously,’ because in fact it’s not a question of past lives in the way that you tend to think of them at all anyway.

“If you have followed other threads to other spools, they will, if the threads are strong enough, appear to be past lives, and for all extents and purposes can be regarded as that. But it’s only one way of looking at it. So it isn’t like Columba left the body and reincarnated as Frank. It really doesn’t quite work that way. Although it could be seen that way, and it’s not entirely wrong to see it that way, but we’re trying to explain to you that where you begin in your conceptualization of the process has a tremendous effect on where you wind up.”

Rita: “I can see that and what I’m struggling with is the best way to ask the questions.”

TGU: “Oh, we know that, and all of this is sort of clearing obstacles out of the way, not just for you but for a lot of other people and so it’s not a wasted effort, and it’s not even a detour. Do continue, and we will get to the answer as best we can.”

More about Bertram

Rita: “All right. We want to return to Bertram. We’ve thought a lot about what we received about him last time, and are wondering if there are some other paths around his threads that connect him and Frank that would be useful for us to know about. One of these areas that Frank is interested in has to do with the structure of the church in the days in which Bertram was at Canterbury. Can you say something about, for example, was there an archbishop there? What role did Bertram play during the time he was there, and anything else you can say about the structure of the church in that time.”

TGU: “You realize that Bertram left Salisbury (he went elsewhere very briefly – not long enough to worry about) and then went to Canterbury, and at Canterbury was installed as a bishop. He was not the archbishop of Canterbury. There were times in which archbishops served also as the bishop of the diocese. There were [other] times in which the archbishop, particularly the important ones, had bishops serving underneath them, in order to do the more administrative tasks, and this was one of those times. The Archbishop of Canterbury was one of the three or four most important English clerics. Therefore he had three bishops serving beneath him. they in turn had parish priests and they also were responsible for the maintenance of the institutions such as cloi—such as convents, and – hmm, cloisters. Using the word “cloisters” threw Frank out a little because he’s accustomed to thinking of cloisters as a hollow square with grass in the middle, but in fact cloisters were also a term used in the sense you use it today, as a cloistered society. So anyway the bishops were responsible for the cloistered societies as well as administering to the laity.”

And in fact, part of Bertram’s punishment – it could be seen as punishment – was that he had to leave the work he was most suited to do, translating and understanding documents, and put him into an administrative position. “Had he been the type to be frustrated, he’d have been very frustrated. As it was, he just took it as, `all right, this is what I do now.’ But he did miss the more intellectual work.”

Apparently in those days the church was more involved in day to day civic affairs than now, sort of informally giving people advice when they asked what they should do about this or that. “He was seen as the good bishop who was a little unworldly, a little not-quite-in-touch but who had good heart and could be trusted to give counsel, and so they tended to use him for that, and he often just rubber-stamped what they asked his advice on, when it was things that both he and they knew that he didn’t really know, and it was just a matter of courtesy. We don’t mean to make it sound like he was either a fool or out of his depth. It was that his primary task was to be the representative of the church in all matters for his people, and no one ever assumed that he would necessarily know practical details. It was like if you went to your grandfather for wisdom.”

Leftover components

Rita: “Are there leftovers or components of that life of Bertram that are reflected as issues for Frank?”

TGU: “Well – now, that’s an interesting way to put it. We would say, if there were 35 threads that together comprised a bundle, and that bundle was common to Bertram and to Frank, that whatever contradictions there were within that bundle are still within the bundle except insofar as Bertram’s own consciousness increased or decreased the contradictions, or changed them, or altered things. Now, you’re getting into a much more complicated and fruitful subject here. This explains why as you live your life moment by moment you really have a sense that it seems to matter, and you really have a sense that you can make a difference, according to what you do. Well, within this relatively static schema of threads connected into bundles, here’s why you have that sense. You live your life. Let’s call you spools, it’s an easy word to use, but in this case meaning a hollow drum filled with threads that are laid down in parallel. It’s just a word. You live your life as a spool and your life presents you with problems. By the nature of what you are and what you experience, where you were put and when, you experience certain tensions, contradictions, growth, regression, mistakes, all of that, you experience life. At the end of that life, when one looks outside of time and space, there is an accumulated experience. There is a something that has lived that life and formed as a result of it. Now the `something’ that made certain choices is qualitatively different than the `something’ that made different choices. That’s the reason to choose. All of those exist, but they don’t exist within time and space, except one at a time to you. That is, as we’ve said, you can choose one or the other. Whichever one you choose seems to you the only real one. Outside of time and space, your completed self is not only your length of years, but it’s also your length of years in every possibility, in every dimension.

“Now, what holds that together could be considered to be the crystal, and each facet of the crystal could be considered to be one set of choices. Now, given that you have choices all the time, you can see how phenomenally complicated it is, but after all, the world is complicated.

When you, in your present-day bundle, move your consciousness down a thread to whatever you share in common with a different bundle, you then have a choice of facets through which to experience it. And you may experience that through a given life that made very bad use of opportunities, or through another that made very good use, of through a third that made very good use but was very opportunistic and not loving, or through a fourth that was or wasn’t opportunistic but was loving –. You see, you have all those possibilities and you will experience them from your side depending on which one of those aspects you go through. And guess what? Which one you experience it though is interconnected with where you are today. Have we lost you on that, or should we go through it again?”

Rita: “Go through it again.”

TGU: “All right, we’ll make it concrete. Frank as a bundle is connected by a certain number of threads to Bertram, who is a bundle. Now, there are various replicas of Bertram and various replicas of Frank. That is to say, each one made different choices: They’re all in different realities. Even though you in your lives can only experience one at a time, when you’re outside of your life you realize that your full completed being is all of your possible realities. Well, this means, if Bertram has some realities in which he sulked and did not make use of his opportunities once he was forced to leave Salisbury, and others in which he made the best use, and still others in which he made some good use and some not good use, Frank has the choice of which of those he’ll interact with, which of those he’ll experience. And that’s how you choose your reality. Another part of his choice is what he has chosen in the past. In other words, who he is. If you have 14 versions of yourself and you can only pick one, what you’ve chosen in the past is where you are right now. Now you can make a conversion experience, you can make a real choice and say, `no, I’m going to be like this,’ that that is then your path. Or you can make smaller choices that move you there. So your choice today as to what you’re going to be also chooses what else you have on the other end of all those threads.

“A simpler, much simpler example is, people say `you choose your reality and the people around you change.’ And that’s true enough, that’s how it appears. But it’s much more profound when you realize that everything in you can be experienced by different handles, and what you choose to be now determines which handles seem most real at the ends of all those threads. Did that help at all?”

Rita: “Okay, and I want to move it back to where we started with this question, which is, are there kind of leftovers from Bertram that present issues for Frank’s life.”

TGU: “Well, hmm. There is certainly the contrast between Bertram’s external existence and Frank’s, which in itself presents a problem of longing, in a way, you know. But we understand your question to be somewhat different from that: Did Bertram fail to resolve issues — or did issues arise that are now still presented to be dealt with by Frank.”

Rita: “I’m asking that question in specifics, but I’d be interested in generalities from one bundle to the next, how much that process is an on-going process through the various –.”

TGU: “Well, we think that where you start tends to distort your understanding of it. It isn’t so much that there’s a psychological problem that exists that has to be corrected before the person can become perfect. We know that’s how it looks; like your lives are a succession of lives tending toward perfection hopefully, or losing ground sometimes. Another way of looking at that same experience though is that every life is a gift of freedom, and that freedom more than any other thing is the freedom to decide what you value and who you are and who you are going to be. Therefore, it’s true in one sense and not true in another sense.

“Let’s say Bertram had a problem with anger. Now, as it happens, that wasn’t Bertram’s problem particularly, but say it had been. And say that his lifetimes end, and when you look at the completed Bertram, you find that in most versions of his life, that problem was not successfully resolved. It isn’t like that’s an unfinished business that has to be taken care of. That’s just what is. When you mix these elements into one life in this time and place, this is what you get. You get x number where it worked this way, and x number where it worked this way, and a third number where it worked a different way. It’s just what is.

“However, Frank, connecting to that life and having strong connections with a life that among other things has an unresolved problem of anger, then taps into that, and it affects his ongoing life. Frank tapping into Bertram will either get a resolved or an unresolved issue, depending on which version he taps into. The version that he taps into depends partly on Frank’s resolve, and partly on what he has done with himself in the past. In other words, he could either just happen to be in the right place, or he could resolve to be in the right place to get the right resonance. When he does that, it’s as though the problem doesn’t exist and never did exist, because it doesn’t exist in him; that’s not what he’s tapping into.

“So you see, Bertram still is Bertram. That crystal is still unchanged. It is what it is. But the way that Frank taps into it makes it appear differently, and it’s as though there was a problem and Frank was set the problem of resolving it and he resolved it. That is a perfectly valid way to look at it, it’s just not the way that we think is as valid as saying, `he changed, and in changing that’s no longer a problem. He walked himself to a different version of himself.’ [pause] Still not an answer, huh?”

Rita: “Well, I think it is. You had used the example at one time of Bertram’s being moved as punishment and he had a choice of how to deal with that. And that the same issues arise for Frank.”

TGU: “Yes. That’s right. And depending on where Frank is with that particular issue, it’s either a non-issue or it’s a big issue. Or anywhere in between. But it doesn’t depend on something that happened to Bertram, because all things happened to Bertram. And it doesn’t depend on what has happened to Frank in the past, because all things have happened to Frank in the past. It’s a matter of which version of which one are you going to look at. And if you’re in your own version in which you are harmonious, you are going to magnetize yourself to other versions of others that are harmonious. It’s not hard. It’s straightforward. Your lives are perfect. It’s just a matter of you seeing the perfection of them and agreeing to the perfection of them. Of realizing how perfect things are.”

Rita: “Except that we are still faced with choice after choice.”

TGU: “Well, but that’s not an `except.’ That’s the perfection of it. I mean, you’re here to choose, that’s what you’re here to do. That’s your fun. But it can be fun. It doesn’t have to be painful. It doesn’t have to be sacrifice. It doesn’t have to be strife, any of those things. It can be fun. If you want it to be.”

Rita: “And the times when it isn’t fun for Frank are just his choice?”

TGU: “Well, choice is sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious, but anything in your lives is choice. If you have an accident, so called, and you lose your arm, on a relatively superficial emotional basis you can say, `I’m going to sulk for the rest of my life because I’ve lost my arm,’ or `I’m going to ask what the purpose of this is, that I lost my arm,’ or `I’m going to resolve that I’ll be more careful in the future/’ In other words, your reaction to that misfortune is in your choice.

“Say you’re the Dalai Lama and you have seen your whole country overrun, and millions of your people killed, and your culture that you loved destroyed, it is still your choice as to how you are to live your life, and how you are to respond to those events. You may life your life in joy in a concentration camp. You may be miserable in a palace. It’s up to you. [pause] This is a great freedom. This is great news you’re hearing, if you can believe it.”

Rita: “Yes. We appreciate that discussion very much. There is a little more time a few more minutes, if Frank would like to just use that time relaxing –.”

TGU: “No, we want to say a couple of things here. You’ve gotten us into very deep water today. Or, another way of looking at it is, we’ve gotten you into very deep water today. And it’s good because you don’t get from one port to another without going through deep water. Do you see what we’re saying? This has more implications than just talking about one person. And you were speculating a while ago about the purpose of these sessions, and you still don’t have the sense of them, but one part of it is, you – you, yourself, Rita – are equipped for the rigorous intellectual discussion and analysis of a way of seeing the world which would be useful to people. So, just by coincidence you’re here doing it. Do you see what we’re saying here? You’re not at the end of anything, you’re at the middle of something at the end of this session. This is only session three, in other words. And again, as always, we appreciate what you’re doing. Not everyone will do this.[pause] Many people would regard what you’re doing as torture.”

Rita: “Well, it’s very interesting and we want to keep up with the discussion and further it if we can.”