Year: 2025

[Excerpts from conversations between Rita Warren and “the guys upstairs,” in the years 2001 and 2002, edited from The Sphere and the Hologram.]

Disasters

R: I had mentioned in an earlier session, on the 11th, that I wanted to return at some point to ask about what we think of as disasters like our recent events, and other times when there’s been loss of life on the earth, either human beings or other life forms, and ask, to the extent that you’re able to alter things in the 3D world, what meaning do these kinds of events have?

TGU: Hmm. [pause] That’s a hard question to answer, phrased that way. It’s rather like asking us what meaning does a day have. Because what you see as all the same kind of things, putting the title of disaster or atrocity or war or whatever around them, to us are infinitely different, and so it’s difficult. We’ll give you an example to show you the difficulty, and then ask you to rephrase it, really. [pause]

If you have that disaster at Bhopal, where people died because of corporate indifference, and a disaster in New York where people died because of an act of war, and a disaster resulting (seemingly anyway) from nobody’s fault – the bridge over St. Luis Rey, if you remember that old example – if you only look at the fact that there is relatively widespread, seemingly indiscriminate death, then you might say those three incidents are three of a kind. And we would say they’re nothing like.

R: Can I add to that list the meteors crashing into the earth and causing major death among the dinosaurs?

TGU: [laughs]

R: That would be another disaster for the dinosaurs.

TGU: Relatively few of the dinosaurs asked questions about it afterwards. [they laugh]

All right, well, see, that’s an interesting example of what you would lump together. To you those four things have something in common, and we can understand the abstract pattern of it, but it would be as though you grouped the people of a city who were all wearing sneakers. Yes, they would have that in common, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a meaningful “in common.” If you could ask that question in a more pointed way –

R: I’ve heard you saying that you have some role in deciding things that happen here. And those things include a major loss of either human life or of other kinds of life on the planet. Why would you want to do something like that? What would be accomplished?

TGU: First, let’s point out that we don’t so much “decide” as we “plan.” We absolutely respect the free will of the individuals involved. They are planning it with us, but if they decided not to do it, we have to run around for Plan B, C, or D. We don’t decide it, we plan it. Having said that, suppose you want to build a new building on a lot that already has an old building. You destroy the old building first. Of course, it depends on what’s going on, but you understand the analogy. If you have an old wooden building on a lot that you intend to build a skyscraper on, the destruction has to come first. [pause]

You all tend to think that death or even injury is necessarily a bad thing, which perplexes us. Although we understand it intellectually, we can’t really empathize with that attitude, because – it’s so funny. It would be like regarding every sunset as a tragedy because it was the end of the day. You’re all going to die, you’re all going to get injured in one way or another, probably, on the way. And when you die, so what? Then you come back, either here or somewhere else.

So we really can’t share your views of the finality of it or even of the importance of it. A sudden death or an accidental death, so-called, or a violent or lingering death – there are a million ways to die – each of them can be molded in such a way as to help the soul that’s experiencing it. As we said, the thousands who died on the same day, on the 11th of September, were volunteers in the first place, and in the second place, you know, thousands of other people died that day who weren’t noticed. So, we know it sounds cold to you, but it’s not a big deal to us.

Now, the orchestrating of an event that can have long term, hopefully positive, effects on society – which, as we have said, only interests us in that it helps to mold people closer to their potential – that’s worth an awful lot of transient human suffering, because the alternative is not a lack of suffering, the alternative is suffering of an entirely different kind.

R: I was thinking not so much about the loss of human life as the impact that that loss has. I hear you saying that can be very positive, in that it has some altering effect on those who are still running around on this earth –

TGU: Yes. Let’s search through the old memories here. Frank’s got all kind of historical analogies. The attack on Pearl Harbor led, by way of an entire war, to a generation of men who were given college educations who never could have had college educations without the war and the GI Bill of Rights. That generation of men, mostly men, in turn had a vastly expanded life in terms of their earning potential and their intellectual horizons, and they added to the intellectual capital of a whole generation of Americans, which affected the whole world.

Now, that isn’t an excuse for Pearl Harbor, and it isn’t the underlying reason for Pearl Harbor, but it is one of the effects of Pearl Harbor. So we think it’s very misleading to look at those who were killed in the attack as if that were the full story, when in fact the story is darker – in that you have all of the 50 million people who were killed in that war – but it’s also lighter in all of the things that followed after the war cleared stuff away. It’s a matter of how wide you spread your net when you do your accounting.

R: You said “although that was not the reason for the event,” as though the reasons for the event are somewhat different than the long-term effect.

TGU: [pause] We’re saying an event has initial consequences and then the secondary consequences and tertiary and quaternary. It goes on and on. You can’t say that the event was caused for the sake of the tertiary consequences. But you can say that those consequences came because of the event. Again, it’s a question of how carefully you do your accounting when you are attempting to see.

Again, you all see things necessarily in time-slices. Because you see them in time-slices, you can’t possibly see them the way we do. What you call the tragedies of World War I and World War II, and everything in between, not to mention the Cold War afterwards, we would look at as the seismic interruption of a world culture that had kind of reached a dead end.… When a society encrusts itself with certain institutions or corruptions or even virtues, it can be impossible to pull them down, no matter how necessary it may be to do it, without some violent, or in any case catastrophic, discontinuity.

—

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15^th anniversary edition, published by SNN / TGU Books, is available as print or eBook from Amazon and other booksellers.

 

[Excerpts from conversations between Rita Warren and “the guys upstairs,” in the years 2001 and 2002, edited from The Sphere and the Hologram.]

Vengeance and choice

R: I’ve been listening in to people’s reaction to [the Sept. 11 event], on the issue of striking back against what’s perceived as the evil forces of Osama bin Laden. And it’s presented often in terms of “This is what we need to do to balance things out.” And I’m asking about this issue of balancing things out in a worldwide sense. You’ve talked about the fact that you see this without the slices of time. You’re looking at the totality, and in the totality everything is balanced out eventually. And the “eventually” means – ?

TGU: A long time. [laughs]

R: So I’m –

TGU: You’re asking, are they right in any sense?

R: I guess.

TGU: Well, if the world had been created the day before yesterday, maybe. But given the history of the planet in any given reality you choose to investigate, once you look at it carefully – even consciously at all! – it becomes obvious there’s no way to balance it out, because every society on the face of your planet is the result of some past aggression somewhere. Everyone has or could have grievances. Everyone wants to get one last blow in and that’ll make them even.

But the people who are saying that aren’t very good at mathematics. The entire point of breaking the cycle of vengeance is that the cycle cannot be completed; it can only be broken. It can’t be completed because every new retaliation creates the seeds of new retaliation in the future, because it can never balance out. It’s foolish talk. Besides, that’s not what they mean. What they mean is, they don’t want to feel that they have been weak, that they have been taken advantage of. That’s all that really amounts to.

R: We talked about our being a certain way as a way of dealing with this kind of thing. Is there more that we could do? For example you said one of the factors in understanding this process is people’s inability to see or integrate their own shadow sides. It’s hard for me to think about how we would go out on a campaign of teaching people to see their shadow sides or to integrate their shadow sides. [chuckles] Is there something in that kind of a realm that we could be doing?

TGU: Well, each will be impelled to do the work that’s proper to each. You will know; you’ll meet the opportunities that come to you. And some people will be called upon to teach, and some to organize and some to stand silently and protest, and some to fly warplanes. There are millions of roles and everyone will know the role that’s there that’s available to them. However – [pause]

Frank: That’s funny, that doesn’t happen often. I know there was something else coming, but it just went away. Wait a minute. [pause] Hmm. I’m going to re-say what they were saying and then maybe it’ll come out again. It just disappeared. I know what they were saying was everybody will have their own thing to do – and that’s obvious. Well, there was another point that wasn’t like that, but…What was the other part of your question?

R: The question had to do with, is there something more that we can do besides try to be the best of ourselves, so to speak. Is there something we can do in this world where everyone is worried about –

Frank: Oh now I know what it was. The other thing that came was that, yes there is a campaign to have people recognize their shadow selves, and that campaign is being orchestrated on their side, not on our side. [laughs] That’s what they’re saying.

R: Okay.

[Resuming as TGU]: The impact of events is a bigger teacher to you than anything that one of you could say to another, and so you are a different country today than you were last month. The difference has been created by your reaction to the events. We can create the events and we can lead you toward – but it’s up to you to choose the lessons to be learned from events, and the ways to change from the events. Because the airplanes hit the buildings, there are people who are a little more chastened and a little more self-reflective and sober today than they were before. There are others who are totally lost in rage, and there are some who are lost in fear. You see? Millions of reactions. And you needn’t worry too much about that, we will provide the opportunities. You can each spread the word, first and foremost by living it, because you’ll spread it on the internal internet, so to speak. First and foremost by living it. There are many people preaching it and if some of them would do less preaching and more living of it, they would be more effective.

But having said that, there are specific things that some of you can do, and you’ll know it. And there are specific things all of you can do and you’ll know it, but some of those may not be external things. They may seemingly be tending your garden in peace, so to speak.

R: What did you mean by a campaign on the other side to orchestrate –

TGU: Well, we’re orchestrating the opportunities, you know.

R: Specifically having to do with people becoming aware of their shadow side?

TGU: Specifically creating situations that allow the opportunity for some people to wake up in response to the situation. So when we create what you are all fond of calling a disaster, it has impact around the world in the unpredictable way that Princess Diana’s sudden death had, or the killing of the Kennedys. Those orchestrated incidents, shall we say – and we remind you that those who participated in those incidents were volunteers – those orchestrated incidents couldn’t have specific effects because the specific effects are more the result of people’s conscious choices, which are free by design. But they set up the circumstances in which people could make the choices. It sort of stressed them toward it, it biased the –

Frank: It’s a visual of pushing on a screen, you know, to push it sideways. I don’t know how to translate that.

TGU: Your choices are always free, as individuals and therefore entirely. All that we can do is set up circumstances and give you opportunities, and it’s up to you to take them. And when you take them or don’t take them, then we scramble with Plan B, you know? [chuckles] We’re always on Plan B.

R: Well as I’m hearing this, I’m wondering, what’s the advantage to free will.

TGU: Because free will is what allows you to create. Free will gives you the opportunity to choose what you will be, what kind of flower you’re going to present to us.

R: But you’re doing so much of the creation on the other side –

TGU: We’re creating the matrix for the free will. [stutters several times]

You’re saying to yourself, “That isn’t quite fair, we have free will but you’re pushing us in certain directions,” and that’s true if you look at it in any one reality. But you need to remember, if you can, that it’s happening in all realities, and you can move to the reality you want to move to. [pause] Well, theoretically.

R: But it seems like since you have preferences about how we choose and how we move, that you’re creating the situations… What is this process all about?

TGU: Let’s make a theoretical example. Supposing you as an organism came into this world intending to get a little experience with selfishness. Both the satisfying of it and the overcoming of it. We and you – but you will no longer remember, because you’re down here in it – we and you set up an endless series of obstacle courses that present you with those situations in which you will choose about selfishness. And choose and choose and choose and choose and choose. Now your choices might cancel out! Or they might radically alter you, or they might leave you the way you were. Don’t forget, you’re in on this process, it isn’t us doing it to you except that in any moment of time, it’s us doing it to you because you’re functioning in the moment of time, and so we’re the ones holding the score, so to speak, or holding the –

R: A plan that we’ve agreed to.

TGU: But you know what? “We’ve agreed to” isn’t quite right, it’s “We are agreeing to” continually, because you’re continually up there with us as we’re modifying into Plan B. But you Downstairs – some of you do and some of you don’t connect Upstairs to be part of that planning. There are actually people who remember the planning, moment by moment. And you could too. It’s a matter of requesting access and getting it. You might find that an interesting process. Takes a lot of the blame away, though. [laughs]

R: I’m just really asking myself “how’d we start on this process anyway, and in the larger sense what is this all about?” Why are we doing this?

TGU: We remind you that you don’t like being bored.

R: Oh. [they laugh]

TGU: You are seeing calculus that was invented because people mastered the times tables. And as we master calculus, then we’ll move on to other games. They’re not meaningless games, but they are games. They’re games in the sense of stretching our abilities, of enjoying it, of playing it, you know. They’re not games in the sense of one wins and one loses, but they’re entertainment. They’re engaging, let’s put it that way. Remember that the next time you get bad news on the television set, it’s better than being bored. [they laugh]

—

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15^th anniversary edition, published by SNN / TGU Books, is available as print or eBook from Amazon and other booksellers.

 

[Excerpts from conversations between Rita Warren and “the guys upstairs,” in the years 2001 and 2002, edited from The Sphere and the Hologram.]

Stagnation

R: Before we started this process, I felt nothing was happening. I assume on principle that what looked like a delay to me had some purpose. But, you know, it’s a big step for me not to feel like there is something we should do to push, rather than just to sit back and say “Well, things come about in their proper time,” you see.

TGU: When things appear to be not moving, sometimes it’s a process of settling in, sometimes it’s a process of preparation. Sometimes it’s a necessary rest, sometimes it’s stopped here because you’re working elsewhere. Sometimes it’s waiting for external circumstances to come around. And sometimes, of course, it is that you are refusing to do what you know you should be doing. But those are all very different circumstances, all of which may look the same.

When things seem like they’re dead still in the water, you can always find out whether things are stagnant or whether they’re fallow. Examine your feelings. Is there something that you know you should do that you don’t want to do and you’re not doing?

We don’t mean this in the sense of “I should be a better person, I should be more helpful”; those are just beating yourself up. But if you’re saying, “This job has to be done, I know I have to do it, but I don’t want to” – that’s not necessarily wrong either, but examine your feelings about that. If you’re shirking something that you legitimately should do, you’ll know it. And if at the same time things feel stagnant, there may be a connection!

Now, your comments brought up two things to talk about, and that was one. The second is, it’s a common mistake to confuse doing nothing externally with doing nothing. A monk in a monastery who is not even speaking to his fellows, who is sincerely and intelligently striving for whatever his own goals are – he would call it, probably, getting closer to God, but you might call it self-development – whatever the goal, someone who is sincerely striving, is not doing nothing.

It may look from the outside that they’re not doing anything productive, or that they’re even shirking their job. But we would say, if you’re shirking your job, you always know it. We would also say, there’s an awful lot of wasted energy going on because people think they must “do something.” But you never have to “do something.” If there’s something you really have to do, you know what it is, you don’t call it “something.” You see? [laughs] So beware of people who say that “We need to do something.”

R: Yes. Well there’s sometimes a sense also of feeling impatient that things aren’t happening, as you suggested, and not knowing what it is that one’s supposed to be doing.

TGU: You always have that knowledge available. Just sit quietly and meditate and ask sincerely. You may not get, “You should go do this,” but in the absence of “You should go do this” you’ll know “No, no, this is fine, what I’m doing.” You see? Waiting sometimes is what you need to do. And while you’re waiting on one level, you’re working on another. [pause] What would you like to do?

R: I would like to do what I’m doing now, but I felt there was a period of time when I was describing myself as spiritually stuck.

TGU: Ah! Well, then we suggest that for your own amusement, or for your own reassurance, go back and look and ask yourself, “What would be different had this happened before that period?” and that will, by reflection, tell you what you got out of that period. And the answer may be, “Well, I had to wait for the time to be right.” Or the answer may be, “I had my attention focused in the wrong place and that delayed it.” But the answer very well may be, “Because of this I’ve been changed to this,” you see. We’re not predicting what the answer will be, but we say it’s a good exercise.

R: Well there’s some sense where you feel that something came so close to not happening, and you feel so pleased that it happened, but it might not have happened!

TGU: There are innumerable realities in which it did not. But you chose the one in which it did. Your choice.

—

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15^th anniversary edition, published by SNN / TGU Books, is available as print or eBook from Amazon and other booksellers.

 

[Excerpts from conversations between Rita Warren and “the guys upstairs,” in the years 2001 and 2002, edited from The Sphere and the Hologram.]

Secret Schools

R: You know, there are some specific places in the world where some things are happening, like the Monroe Institute training process and other similar things, where people are getting some direction in this process, but it seems as though most of the world isn’t there, so are we talking about building little islands here that will somehow spread?

TGU: There are always secret schools, and secret schools may not even know that they are secret schools. They may have their attention firmly placed on something else, but of course from the other side we can direct the opportunities and we can suggest to people the lessons to be learned from things. You know the parable of the leavening of the loaf. It takes only a tiny bit to leaven a huge loaf. If the leaven were absent, the bread would not rise. If it were all leaven, it wouldn’t be bread. If all the leaven were in one place, it wouldn’t rise evenly. It’s a matter of proper proportions in the proper place.

You are a member of one secret school, although it may not know that it’s a secret school – some do and some don’t, depending on their perception – and this secret school is being supported from our side in order to provide a cadre of people with improved access to certainty, so that they may be anchors of stability to those around them. But there is no necessity to have 13,425 Monroe Institutes around the world. There’s no necessity to have that same number of Trappist monasteries throughout the world. Or Buddhist monasteries, or Islamic study centers, or synagogues. You see? Secret schools are secret for one reason – because they’re right out in the open. That’s the only way to keep a secret. They’re secret because people can’t see what’s in front of them.

And in a secret school – we’re using that word meaning a school that teaches secrets – it is not necessary that the people in that school, on a Downstairs level, understand what they’re doing. It is only necessary that they change. So their Upstairs component is leading them gently to do this, that and the other, and some are good Catholics and some are good Muslims, and there are innumerable members of secret schools who consider themselves to be atheists. It doesn’t matter to us! And in fact, it is an old law of nature that safety is found in diversity. So, if you need your secret schools to continue and to be invulnerable to the vagaries of history, scatter them out in 50 million different ways. Make them look nothing like each other.

R: And some will survive.

TGU: More than some. And it’s not so much a question of surviving, that’s a little too grim. It’s more a question of, some will have greater influence than others.

You’re not in a situation where it’s beginning to rain and there’s only one ark.

—

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15^th anniversary edition, published by SNN / TGU Books, is available as print or eBook from Amazon and other booksellers.

 

[Excerpts from conversations between Rita Warren and “the guys upstairs,” in the years 2001 and 2002, edited from The Sphere and the Hologram.]

The Record and the Needle

R: We’ve heard the term Akashic records. Does that term mean to you the total knowledge that’s available to you to tap into?

TGU: Well, it’s not a library building, the way some people like to think of it, and, you know, it’s not a computer terminal, but it is there, objectively written (so to speak) in the fabric of time-space, and you probably will stump us if you ask how we read it, we just – read it. But if we were to ask you, How do you remember last Thursday, could you answer? You don’t know, you just do. It’s such an automatic mechanism, it would be very difficult to trace out. The Akashic record is not separate from time-space, it is time-space. It’s the same thing. So if you’re looking at it, there it is. But how we get to looking at it – we do it by intent, same as when you talk, and as when we talk. Just as it is your intent that points this conversation. [pause] Have we confused you?

R: I am following that, and I’m thinking about it and making sure that I understand what you were saying. You were saying that you from your perspective have the advantage in that you’re seeing it all at once, and the totality of it –

TGU: Well we didn’t quite phrase it as an advantage; it’s just a circumstance. There are advantages to being quite pointed in time-space, and disadvantages, and obviously, the other way around. Our disadvantage is a somewhat diffused consciousness. It’s an advantage, it’s a disadvantage. It depends on how you look at it. We would not at all say it’s an absolute advantage over you; it’s an advantage in certain ways. We have an advantage not so much in perspective as in totality of access. You can provide the needle to play the record, we can provide the record to be played by the needle.

R: I like that. When I interpreted you to have said that you understood more, you asked us to get back to you on that. That didn’t seem to be quite the way to put it. You were using an analogy of a child and an adult.

TGU: Our meaning would be that a child sees probably more clearly because it’s more clearly focused: It’s absolutely right at the moment. But what it sees it may interpret badly for lack of context. This is the only way in which we would make the analogy between us on this side and us on – you on your side. It is like a parent-child relationship, in that respect strictly, not in any other way.

But our perspective is tempered by our experience, and the experience is relatively vast because we have vastly expanded access. Your awareness is perhaps more acute than ours, because where we see somewhat fuzzily because our consciousness is less intense, you see sharply as anything, and your struggle is to be able to provide a proper interpretation to what you see so clearly.

[pause] We do want to stress, that’s the only aspect of the parent-child analogy that applies. We’re not saying that you were created from us or anything on that order. [pause] Although, that would be another metaphor, actually, [chuckles] but we don’t want to muddy those waters.

—

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15^th anniversary edition, published by SNN / TGU Books, is available as print or eBook from Amazon and other booksellers.

 

[Excerpts from conversations between Rita Warren and “the guys upstairs,” in the years 2001 and 2002, edited from The Sphere and the Hologram.]

How TGU Access Knowledge

R: I have understood from you Gentlemen Upstairs that you have a great deal of information – maybe almost all of the information – and that our job is to suggest a focus for identifying the information by asking questions.

TGU: You will have to pardon us if we always answer literally what you say, because we’re so aware of slippage in communications. We would say we have access to knowledge and probably have access to further knowledge when you want it. We’re trying to emphasize, we don’t ourselves know, but we can find out.

R: Okay, well, one question that arises for me is, how does all this information become available to you?

TGU: [pause] To us the process is more or less what it is to you when you’re thinking about something without needing external resources like books or conversation. It’s as though we’re ruminating, only we’re kind of gravitating toward the information.

R: So it isn’t as though the information has to be collected.

TGU: Well that’s how the information is collected. It’s the same way that you do when you associate ideas, or when you hook a fantasy to a dream to an idea to a thought to something you’ve read. It could be looked at that you’re collecting information. It’s really a very similar process.

R: And then does the information get organized in some way?

TGU: It does if you organize it. You organize it.

R: But you don’t have the sense of speaking out of organized files, so to speak.

TGU: Well – we speak out of the knowledge in the same way that you speak out of the knowledge when you talk and don’t censor in advance what you’re saying. It’s really about the same thing. You’ve heard us begin to say something, stop, go at it again from another way to organize the same material that will lead to a slightly different nuance. You all do the same things when you speak – or even when you think, but it’s more obvious when you speak.

R: You started out last time, in response to my question about evil, by saying there are three different ways to look at this material, something like that. That’s what I was meaning by the organization of the material in some way.

TGU: Ah. Well, wait, let’s look at the process. This isn’t something we had to go fetch, so to speak, and therefore you could look at it like these are organized thoughts in the way that you have organized thoughts when you discuss a subject you’ve thought about before. You know how the first time you try to explain something, you make a jumble of it, and by the third or fourth time you try to explain the same thing it has organized itself, seemingly spontaneously? The same with us. When you ask us something on which we are pretty firm, we can say, “Well, it’s this, this, this, and this. And we’ll talk about this first and then this and then this.”

We keep coming back to the fact that it’s almost too simple to get across to you that you and we are the same thing, with more or less the same ways of being, and the main difference is the time-space matrix that you function in and we do not. So, any time that you’re wondering how we operate, start with the assumption that it’s the same way that you operate, and then see that if you can intuit how that would be without the time-space constraint. You may not get it right, but it’ll be very productive. And – as Frank’s very fond of saying – it’ll have the meta-purpose of accustoming you to thinking at a deeper level about how similar we and you are, how it isn’t “them and us” it’s just us. [pause] And you have to realize, that was a short answer, for us.

—

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15^th anniversary edition, published by SNN / TGU Books, is available as print or eBook from Amazon and other booksellers.