A step beyond (2)

Summary of the PREP session held in the Bob Monroe Lab at TMI on Tuesday May 11, 2004, beginning 9: 30 a.m., Skip Atwater at the controls, Rita Warren accompanying him, Frank in the black box, the gentlemen upstairs (TGU) providing the talent.

We decided that I should wait until something happened. I spent some time silently connecting with Bertram and the Egyptian priest. I remembered visiting Salisbury Cathedral in 2003, and being annoyed at the changes they’d made since Bertram’s time. Then I got the image of “some kind of light fixture or candelabra or something, suspended below a dome in a church. Hugely high dome; suspended a long way.” I realized, it was an analogy to our position in the world – we are bits of light suspended from a long way up, illuminating the space around us.

Bertram’s view of healing

Rita asked to contact Bertram, to see how he sees the process of healing the physical body, the response was that we would be dealing with the Completed Bertram, rather than Bertram-moment-by-moment, and so he would be able to describe Bertram’s life outside of the beliefs and understandings he had held in life. The concept of completed-self versus in-process self, which was given to Rita and me in our 2001-2002 sessions, seems to explain why sometimes we contact people as if we were talking to them at a certain moment in their lives, and other times we come to something that has the over-all view of that lifetime, which I now think of, loosely, as that person’s “higher self.” The concept could bear a good deal of clarification, and I hope someone will provide it.

In any case, apparently Bertram experienced the healing process as “the inflowing grace of God removing the effects of sin, or, another way of looking at it, spirit coming in and correcting all the defects of the body.” Completed-Bertram says that body, mind, and soul seem separate to us only because we see them “through separate windows,” either through the senses or the mind or the heart. “The reality is that as you change the mind, the body changes, and as you change the body the mind changes, and I will tell you that as you change the soul, either one changes, because it’s the same thing.”

Bertram says that the inflow of grace into the sin-distorted body and soul, in perfecting them, removes the obstacles to perfect health. “To translate it again into your terms, it would be that your own separation from your source is the only thing that leads to physical, mental, spiritual problems, and to the degree and the extent to which you remove the separation, the obstacles, the body and soul automatically unbend, so to speak, and attain their upright structure.”

Rita pointed out that in healing work, I too conceive of the energy of the source flowing through me. Bertram said that I was on the right track, but “he is on uncharted ground because we had an entire articulated system behind us,” and we in our vastly changed circumstances do not. “The latest increment of power came when he learned to remember to call help from the other side in the form of [Saint] Columba, saying that he wished Columba to come through and work through him.” In Bertram’s day, he pointed out, they would have asked for the power of the Christ to come through them.

“In our day, our practice was ever-increased humility and piety, ever increased purity. Now, there are different ways of attaining those, but one cannot be a clear channel and at the same time an obstructed channel. Nothing obstructs the clear flow more than anything which gives one a sense of being other than a channel. As an example, pride obstructs, because pride says `I myself am what is important, and everything else comes second.’ Some study of the seven deadly sins, and a return to the study of theology, would help him to devise means that will work for him to clear the channel. Really all anyone needs to heal themselves or to help heal others is to become an ever-purer channel of grace, as we would say. Of the Christ energy. of spirit, pr however you need to say it for yourselves. It’s a matter of him consciously becoming a better, purer, clearer channel. It’s not a technique that’s lacking here, it’s a refining of essence. The refining of essence will lead automatically to the technique, because it is as though it restores memories of things he never knew.”

And this led to the question of trust between healer and the one seeking healing. When the two have a relation of mutual trust, healing flows easily. But some individuals by their nature raise emotional obstructions, defenses, and other kinds of psychological mechanisms which can get in the way of the flow. It is the healer’s job to refine his own essence so that he can function without first having to establish this basis of trust. “If you have someone who don’t raise any of those hackles, then the channel is clear because they didn’t happen to raise them. But what you need to do, if you want to do this dependably, is to be able to deal with someone who does raise those hackles, and not have the hackles raised!” The way to do that, he suggested, is to purify your being and “love your enemies.”

Tools for healing

Bertram – or perhaps TGU, as one shades into the other – suggested that healers have a mental checklist to remind themselves of obstacles and the need to remove them. He suggested that the sacraments of the church served that purpose. “We always worked a certain way.” The sacraments designed for healing, such as Extreme Unction, “always are performed in the identical way, in sequence.” This ritual formed a framework that assured that they would not omit any necessary steps in their own spiritual preparation. The making of such a list will help a healer make the process second nature.

“You asked specifically for a tool, and we’re saying, that’s the tool. The other tool is – refinement. Any healer needs to refine his nature. It’s not the place for ego, or fear, or superstition, or taking advantage, or any of those things. All merely personal reactions can interfere with the clear channel of grace, and without the clear channel of grace there is no healing. Without that it’s like you’re depending on your personal worth and at least in my way of understanding, it wasn’t our personal worth. It wasn’t me, but it was Christ in me. We know that sounds like superstition in your age. It’s just because you don’t understand the underlying reality. But yours is the age that will recover that understanding.” We are bridges, they say, between what was and what is coming.

So, a mental checklist, continuing refinement of one’s nature and, a third tool – overcoming any residual illusion of separation from one’s fellows. They say that is the basic problem. Overcome the illusion and you then know. Once knowing, then the flow is not inhibited.” This is harder for us, today, because we are working without the religious structure. “True religion is nothing but a continuous reminder that the senses are illusory in telling us that we are separate, you see. So we lived our lives in bodies that told us we were separate, but we lived in a religious setting that told us we were not, so it enabled us to have a foot in both worlds, which is what you need, and without the external church setting, which I agree cannot and should not be reconstructed. You can’t go back to where we were; you need to go forward to what is being constructed. You need what we had in the church; a social and also an individual reinforcement of the view of the knowing not only that you’re not alone, but that `alone’ is meaningless; that there’s only everything, there isn’t some things and not other things. We cannot undertake to give you that new structure. That’s part of what you’re there doing, is discovering it.”

Rita: “Is it possible in our world to operate in this state of oneness without becoming paralyzed with respect to the activities of this world?”

Bertram/TGU: “Far from becoming paralyzed, you become more aware. Your awareness is wider, your abilities are wider. If you want an example of what it’s like, examine your lives of your saints. The lives of the saints have been privatized by the church and need to be brought out again, because they were real happenings and they are real examples for you, the difficulty being that you have to separate the example of the life from the framework we built around those lives. So someone like Columba could see things at a distance, knew things that would happen before they did, had, in short, what you would call extrasensory powers. That is a small example of how you become, the more you experience oneness at a deep level. Not just a conscious concept of it, but a living in oneness.”

Bertram said that he and I and Columba and Joseph in Egypt and others share major threads. “There’s more of an emotional closeness between what I am, and what Columba is, what Frank is, than there is between any of us and, say, a soldier or a merchant or a housewife, while following this thread.” The point being, which threads we choose to follow determines what we become.

Rita: “Is there a category of these particular individual energies represented along this set of threads? Are we talking about a category like saints?”

Bertram: “There is a difference between an internal thread that is shared among people, on the one hand, and any obvious link in their lives on the other hand. One might be seen as a saint, another might just be seen as a nondescript farmer and a third as merchant or whatever, but they could still share that inner thread of healing. Many a grandmother is a healing presence, not seen that way but experienced that way by the family. So yes, there is a very strong thread, but that thread is not necessarily one that would look obvious even if we gave you a list of the names of the people on the thread. We think your question meant, if one went back, could one say Frank is connected to a long line of saints or healers? And one answer would be yes, but another answer would be, but so are you; so is everyone. The question is, which thread do you choose to take up? We remind you, there’s still only one of all of us. We’re all one interconnected, inseparable being, it’s just that some aspects are closer to the parts of yourselves that are closest to your consciousness, than others.”

He added, “You have within yourselves all possible contradictions. Some people are bundles that have more of one kind of thing than another, and your convenient shorthand says, `that’s a very warlike person,’ or a very saint-like person, or a very rational person, or a very emotional person.” As they put it, we are compromises that we make in order to make sense of something far too complicated to be made sense of without the generalizations.

Astrology and our lives

Rita said she got the sense that I was moving into another phase of my life, and they agreed that I was moving on to other things. She asked if my sense that the phases could be seen in the progressions of my astrological birth-chart made sense to them.

TGU: “Oh, absolutely. You will remember that Edgar Cayce said it would profit anyone to study astrology. That’s your cosmic weather report. It doesn’t tell what you’ll do, but it tells what you’ll be inclined to do. Impelled, actually, is not a bad word. You’ll tend to feel this way, react this way, gravitate toward this or that.” They described astrology as scientific enough, mechanistic enough, to help people to move on to a new world-view. “It is an accurate predictor of your inner weather, and serves as a reminder that everything is connected.” In fact, any form of divination works, because everything is one. “Make up a new rule and it will automatically work.” Astrology is the only form of divination that pins you down in time. “Dreams, precognition, telepathy – anything else – has no necessary time. Psychics are notoriously bad on pinpointing time. Astrology, on the other hand, is notoriously perfect at pinpointing time.” But, of course, it is ambiguous in terms of what it means.

So astrology will tell you exactly that this will happen then, and something meaningful with these characteristics will be your underlying background weather at that particular moment. What it doesn’t say is what you will be, because two people to be born at the same time and place would have many similarities in their circumstances, and the difference between their reactions will be the nature of the soul that came in at that time and place. “The weather underneath will be identical. In an inauspicious moment one may kill someone in a moment of anger, another might say `boy that really annoys me’ and go on to other things. It’s the same weather. There is no determinants in terms of what you will do. All of your free will is in the moment. You can do whatever is possible in any given moment. But you are in one situation. You are here, you’re not in China. You were born in 1910, not born in 1912. You were born an Englishman, not an Indian woman. All of those things are the determinants. But in any given moment, that moment has the free will to say `I’m annoyed but I’m not going to give in to it,’ or to not even be annoyed, or to give in to it in a big way or to have a major temper tantrum. Your lives have patterns. You came into the world in a certain time, in a certain place, because that was the ongoing pattern, that was the ongoing weather, that offered you the best chance of accomplishing what it was you were attempting to accomplish, in this given lifetime. None of it is chance.”

The problem of evil

Rita asked how she should think about the problem of evil in the world.

TGU: “You want to know how you do think, or how you should think, or how we think you should think?”

Rita: [chuckles] “I’m asking, how can we possibly make sense of this experience in the world?”

The guys said it’s very simple. “Think of yourselves as bundles of threads, and those threads connect to everything. We are all good and evil. We all have all threads. All possibilities are within us. But it becomes a question of which thread do we follow, which threads do we encourage? `As a man thinketh in his soul, so is he.’ Okay? It is a common mistake to say, `those people were evil.’ It is much closer to the truth to say, `those people did evil.’ And there is a huge difference between those two statements. Some people do choose evil. Some people do evil without exactly choosing it. Some people see themselves as helpless and wind up doing evil even not wanting to. There’s a huge spread between possibilities that result in the same action. We remind you, `judge not, lest you be judged.’ It’s important. `Hate the sin, love the sinner.’

You see, all of these things that we had in our time to give us a coherent code, you do not have, and it makes your lives harder. Don’t despair and don’t be hopeless, just recognize, all of you are intrinsically connected to evil, connected to good. The more internally based one is, the more resistance one has to doing evil. It’s really quite that simple.”

Rita: “Sometimes as you talk I get the sense that you believe evil exists. Other times I’m hearing you say, `well, maybe evil doesn’t exist, misbehavior exists.’”

TGU: It’s just a matter of polarities. But you’re living in polarity. While you are living in polarity, you know things that are good for you and evil for you. You would not have any hesitation in seeing that torturing a person is evil, although there are circumstances in which you might say it’s a necessary evil. And there might even be extreme circumstances in which you would say the equivalent of `he had it coming.’ or `this is necessary.’ Or more than necessary, `this is good’.”

“The ambivalence is, you don’t all have the identical scale of good and evil. But you are in a world of polarities, and you cannot help have good and evil. You will remember that Jesus said, `because you are lukewarm, I’ll spit you out of my mouth.’ He didn’t mean that it’s better to be evil than to be lukewarm, but you have to live the polarities in order to — live. The only way to avoid polarities in your life is not to live. So this means you must choose. In your Bhagavad-Gita, Arjuna says, `I don’t have anything against those people,’ and he is told `this is your role; you have to play the role. Go fight even though you don’t believe in it.’ Now, that should be both confusing and helpful, because it’s an entirely different belief system. Nonetheless, the underlying commonality is, you are living in a world of polarity, and you have no way not to live in a world of polarity – except insofar as you can remember that all is one. So that’s why it seems inconsistent to you.”

Rita: “So those who are saying it’s possible to live in a non-dualistic state while operating out of a physical body are wrong?”

TGU: “Well, let them demonstrate it! Let them be both male and female at the same time, and then we’ll come back and we’ll reconsider. How can you live without polarities? Night and day, hot and cold, in and out, up and down. Life in a body is intrinsically polarity. There’s no way out that we know of. But it’s not only polarity; that’s our point. You will remember Frank’s understanding one day that it should be called the Tree of the Perception of Good and Evil? Regardless whether you perceive them as good and bad, they are. They just are. You are in polarity.”

A new level of intensity

At Skip’s suggestion, Rita asked TGU to speak of America’s wars and the outcome of its on-going so-called War on Terror. The very first thing they said was, “Remember, you become like the worst in those you fight.” They predicted that the outcome of the war would be “an increased fanaticism in the United States, a decreased trust, an increased fear and therefore hatred of differences, a more schismatic way of looking at things, so that rather than fellow citizens they become potential enemies…. All you need to do is look at your enemies as you perceive them, and it will tell you how you are going to be affected. There is no physical possibility that terrorists will take over your country, in terms of running things, in terms of walking in and setting up a government. There is a very real possibility, a probability, that they are winning in terms of your becoming what you would not have become otherwise.

“Now, when you ask about the war on terror, you must ask yourself do I mean wars fought overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya and anywhere else, or do I mean protection of the American continent from terroristic incidents, or do I mean the protection of the American political, economic network that suffuses the world, or do I meant the isolation or integration of America with its traditional allies or with international orders, — all of those are very different questions, most of them not being considered very actively. We would say to you, the active consideration of those questions will tell you more about the course and effects of the war than any question of whether or not America could ostensibly lose the war. America cannot lose the war in conventional terms any more than it could lose the war in Iraq, but it can wind up in a situation which it is unable to resolve, and in that sense, does lose.

“The Vietnamese government did not take over America, but it did defeat America’s attempt to impose a western structure upon an eastern culture. That is not what America thought it was doing, but that’s how the Vietnamese perceived it. At the same time, the Vietnamese experience coarsened America to the extent that it fought, and brought in extensive drug use, extra-legal and illegal activities at all levels of government, seemingly as a necessity of the war, etc., etc. World War II brought forth a transformation of America into a country that could drop Atomic bombs on Japan, but could also with malice aforethought turn Dresden into a firebomb that killed 300,000 people. America could not have done that in 1938 [the year before World War II began in Europe]. It was well capable of doing it by 1945.”

“You become like the worst in those you fight. `Resist not evil,’ Jesus said, and he said it for a reason. [pause] We don’t mean to paint a bleak picture. These are experiences, and you’re here to experience. You can always learn from what you’ve done, or what has happened to you, whichever way you wish to see it. All is still well.”

Rita: “We’ve talked before about the difficult times ahead, and that we are already in the midst of them, as we talk about them. And I guess the question is, is this the level at which we will continue to experience these changes?”

TGU: “Oh, not nearly. Now, we want to put this in a positive way, because it is as positive as it is negative, and it’s a mistake to look at things negatively. You really want to remember at least in one part of yourselves that all is well. It really is true. As you adjust to a new level of intensity, the intensity gets ratcheted up, and you learn to adjust to a new level of intensity. After this happens ten times, you’re not the same person you were at the beginning. In fact, it’s a good analogy to what happens to a country in war. You’re not the same person, but you’re able to do so much more and bear so much more and have more effect. It’s ratcheted up be degrees because you need to learn to get used to it and then go on. You are still mostly in what you used to know as normality. You’re only just beginning – but this is not a reason or an excuse for panic or even for depression. You are transforming what it is to be human. On the other end of this is a human race which is immediately and firmly, beyond any doubt, aware of its connection to the other side. A human race that lives that way is not the same human race you were, before all this began, which is a good while now.

“We remind you, you are here because you came to be here and contribute. Nobody’s here as an innocent victim. And nobody’s here as a helpless victim. You’re here and you can contribute, and that’s what you came to do. It isn’t the only thing you came to do, but you did come here, in this time, in this place, because this is where you could work out your salvation of your soul, is the way that Bertram would put it.”