Disasters

[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.

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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.