[The night of the day of the terrorist attacks that coordinated the hijacking of four airplanes and destroyed three buildings in New York City as well as killing an unknown number of people.]
Rita Warren: All right. Well as you know this has been a sad day for us and we’re checking in to see if this is good thing for Frank to do a session with us tonight.
F: Good thing for him.
R: Good thing for him. All right.
F: He tends not to get in touch with this stuff.
R: Meaning an emotional barrier to it, or – ?
F: He tends not to be in touch with emotions responding to [inaudible]
R: We’ve had it seems an extraordinarily large number of people moving from the physical into the “there” today. And this raises for us questions about the best way for us to deal with such things as a disaster. Do you have some comments you’d like to make about that?
F: That’s an excellent question. It’s the best question you could ask. Because this is only the beginning. As you know. From your own points of view, the central necessity will be to monitor your own reactions. Your reaction to the events that are coming will of course delimit the possibilities for you to move. That is, your choices are constrained by your prior emotional reactions, so that were you to react in fear, or were you to react in rage, or were you to react in any of myriad ways, certain lines of development would be opened and others would be closed. This is said less for the particular people who are in this room than for the record because this is – as we’ve said before – a record for others.
R: Mm-hmm.
F: Our primary advice would be, to hold your center, to stay on an even keel. And this does not mean do not react, but it means, in the midst of your reaction, remember who you are. For your own sakes, but also because of the part that you came here to play.
R: I’d like to come back a little later to question what happens from your perspective when we have this kind of disaster, but go ahead now with questions around what you suggested, which is how we handle this kind of turmoil and fear-arousing incidents for many people. Is there a way in which we can be helpful in counter-acting the fears and anxieties – both our own and others’?
F: Yes. You’re acting behind clouds. That is, maintaining what you are has its effect on all the rest of us. You know, you must remember that you are a part of a thing, and a part can affect the rest of the whole. You aren’t isolated individuals who can only influence each other by thoughts or words or actions. It’s by what you are. So, this looks on the one hand innocuous, and on the other hand looks ineffective, depending on the motive of the person looking, but in actual fact it is the most serious response, it is the most effective response possible while you are in bodies
R: It’s one thing for us to be here in Virginia listening to events that are happening elsewhere; it’s really hard to imagine that if we were closer to the events we wouldn’t be in states of fear and anxiety ourselves.
F: Oh no. There are people on Manhattan Island doing the same thing you’re doing, but for the same reason that they will not hear of you in the news, you will not hear of them. You were not left as a little island off to the side. The field has been seeded. We think you understand the analogy.
R: I understand that, but – we talk about the idea of releasing fear, releasing anxiety, and that sounds great, but how do we do that? That seems a very difficult thing to do, once you’re in the middle of —
F: How did you do it?
R: Well, I’m at some distance from it. If my children were there, if I were there myself, I can’t imagine that I would be feeling as calm and relaxed and as centered as I feel here.
F: Well, that’s true – but there have been times in your life when you were in the center of things, and at those times, we ask again, what did you do? It’s only a rhetorical question, but the temptation here (that is, in your country) will be far greater from anger than from fear.
R: Yes.
F: Now, granted the anger will stem from the fear, but more people will be in anger than will be in fear, and it will be a much stronger, and more manipuable emotion. However, if you ask, what can you do to help others maintain their centered-ness, we say again, maintain your own. It’s not ineffective.
R: Yes, that’s kind of the same theme we have for a lot of things; when we’re trying to heal, when we’re trying to send others good wishes, or love. You were talking last time about being a beacon. That struck a great nerve with me all week. And I thought about it in connection with the exercise that a research group used to do here of trying, during a disaster, to open a path for those individuals who were ready to move over with minimum anxiety and minimum fear; representing ourselves as beacons leading to a simple pathway for people to pass through, and thought about – children would be perhaps the easiest to think of moving in that way, because they wouldn’t be loaded with fear, and expectations.
F: Well, the children don’t miss anything, but they often misinterpret, of course. But the beacon is an excellent way to do. You weren’t so much leading them through as you were letting them change to resonate with what you were. A minor point
R: Mm-hmm. It seemed as though we were just pointing to an opportunity for them. In that sense just being a beacon.
F: In the sense that you were a stabilized point, that got them through; helped them get through. You understand, you were a stabilized point, and that’s what we’re asking you to do now. Being a stabilized point helps smooth the waves and the sloshings around.
R: It seemed as though that would be something that we could do that might be helpful for those people who were easily ready to move to a non-physical state. But for all the others, we often did what we called rescue missions. Do you have some comments to make about that?
F: You could say that in a way the period you’re coming to now is unprecedentely different. You are loaded around you with volunteers, who came in to do just this part of the drama.
You will remember that last time we were talking about the things one could bring into a given life that that person could handle — you couldn’t bring everything in to deal with at one time. Well, another aspect of that is, the kind of death someone has can also help to put them into a situation on the other side, that they can learn from, that they can grow from. It’s a way of working, just as you come into this side, into a situation that is sort of planned for you, giving you certain opportunities so that you can grow. And you make your choices from there.
Well, when you go to the other side it’s the same thing. You’re being born into the other side, into a certain limited situation. And just as in this life you might come in with cerebral palsy, in that life you may come in with a traumatic death in an explosion or something that gives you no time to make sense of it. And that, interacting with your belief systems at that time — which is another way of saying interacting with the product of what you have made yourself — sets up the situation on the other side. We realize that it looks like all the action is in 3D Theater, but there’s as much action going on on the other side as here; it’s the interaction between the two that allows, shall we say, changes of scene. But when you go to the other side, that isn’t taking off the makeup and sitting in the back room, kicking your heels; that’s involved in another play over there. It’s just different terrain, different constraints. So what we’re trying to say is, the deaths that people die are part of their birth on the other side. It’s neither meaningless nor accidental.
R: So I guess that’s why the Buddhists have so many ideas about what death should be like. Seems to me the Buddhists are very concerned about the nature of a death of a physical person.
F: Well – we’re smiling. It’s true, but all we can say is that people, by what they are, form preferences without even knowing it. Smooth will look preferable to someone as opposed to rough. But it’s only a preference. We wouldn’t say that the Buddhists have the final word on the subject. They have a final word, if you want to look at it that way. That is, it is a way of looking at things; it’s a productive way; it’s not the only way.
R: I’ve noticed that when people get to my age, they begin to think about death much more frequently, and people often state preferences for ways of dying. Does that kind of preference make any difference?
F: Does it affect how you will die, you mean?
R: Yes.
F: If you want it to. [pause] But the joker in the deck is, whose “you”? Unless you put a gun to your head, you Downstairs are not going to have the final say in this. Upstairs will pull the plug, as you always say.
R: But people state preferences for a sudden death, for example, versus long lingering illnesses, or things of that sort.
F: But it’s also true that people don’t know what’s good for them too! [laughs]
R: Ah. Okay. Or conscious death. People so often state a preference for conscious death. Or fear conscious death. There seems to be a lot of concern about the nature of death.
F: Well, we hear you saying, and we would agree with you saying, that people’s preferences are a matter of a flowering of what they are. But their preferences may not be what they know and want at a different level. If we had one bit of advice, we would just say “relax about it” to all of you, because it may or may not be what you consciously want, but it isn’t going to be by accident, and isn’t going to be at random. We have a saying, “all is well, all is always well,” and we really do mean that, all the way through. No matter what it looks like.
R: Okay now, I’m going to go back to your point about having a plan. Is this also a matter of choice on the other side?
F: Well, the short answer would be yes. The longer answer would be, again, keep in mind who you refers to. Here’s the thing! If you look at what we are, — okay, how are we going to do this?
Supposing we took just one tentacle of the octopus, okay? Just you. Yourself. But you in your totality up to the point where you connect with all the rest of us. You’ll see that here you have an animal that’s quite different from the animal that you think you are because you’re dealing with this one little slice between your one birth and your one death. You have all the rest of this level of consciousness to be conscious of – and then there is the consciousness that is all that, and of course beyond that the rest of the octopus. So a lot of misunderstanding slides in there, because you all have a tendency to slide that definition in the middle of your sentence without even recognizing it. It’s planned, but not by the little you on this side, and not by the little you that just got born on the other side.
R: Because you have become part of the totality in a more conscious way?
F: Well, again, it depends on which part of the “you” you’re talking about. Let’s suppose that your total “you” is 100 square miles; just to make something up. Maybe one square mile of that is lit up and conscious, a seemingly separate consciousness. The other 99 percent is conscious of itself but not necessarily apparent to the one. All right? There’s a reason for that, because it makes the experience possible.
R: Mm-hmm.
F: Well, when you’re born into the other side or born into this side, either way, the overall being is conscious, but the being that is there being presented with choices – in order to grow – is not automatically conscious of anything. To the degree that you increase your consciousness over here, consciousness will be increased over there, you see? You’re widening your field of action. That can be a relatively permanent gain, so that you could say you become larger with practice. You don’t really, but your span of consciousness becomes larger. Okay? You have more control over larger things, more awareness of connection. Does that answer that?
R: Well, yes, it’s not the little “you” that’s here, but the expanded “you” that’s on the other side when you first move over, say. But you’re saying that that “you” is again a small part of the totality.
F: Mm-hmm. You all have a tendency to assume that once you get to the other side you know everything and you’re connected to everything. One level it is so, and the other level it isn’t. There are different kinds of constraints, and they operate in different ways.
R: Well are you talking about an increasing consciousness of the you as you live a life and then live between lives and again repeat the cycle over a number of times? That there comes increasing awareness of the totality?
F: There can. Depending on your choices. You can also lose ground, of course.
R: But where are you in this process?
F: Well, we’re mostly graduated. [laughs]
R: You’re graduated from the circle of in and out?
F: Mm-hmm. Mostly. I suppose we could be enticed back in, perhaps, given the right need. You have your examples of your boddhisattvas like Jesus, who came in not of their own need to incarnate on a smaller level but on a larger level out of a need to play a part, to show the way. So we could be brought back in for that reason, but not –
You could look at it like a natural cycle in which the seed is planted, the seed goes a certain way and flowers or doesn’t flower and then dies down, and the seed could come up again. Your souls are like that. You have a time at which you’ve been planted and you need to grow and increase and experience, but then when that cycle’s completed, you don’t need to keep doing that. You see? Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.
R: And are we talking about here many, many lifetimes, or does it vary from –?
F: It varies because it mostly depends on choices. To a degree it depends on the circumstances, but really that’s a way of saying choices too. You can draw complicated pictures or simple pictures. A simple picture doesn’t take as long to draw. And if you extended this beyond one lifetime and looked at the whole overall pattern as a picture, some come in and go out with a simple picture. Others do more complicated things. (Except of course, it isn’t “others”; it’s — a part of us does this, a part of us does that.) Again, the analogy of the field of grass. If all the stalks were identical, it wouldn’t be perfect, but artificial.
R: Mm-hmm. Well, as you know, I’m always trying to find out who you are. Are you then the totality of individual parts who have done this in a very simple way, a very complicated way, have lived many lives, have lived few lives — all of these alternatives are in the you that’s responding to these questions?
F: Yes as long as you remember that the “you” that’s responding to these questions is also you. We’re all one thing. It just looks separate on your side.
R: Yes it does.
F: And [chuckles] therefore all possible variants are part of us. Or we are part of all possible variants. We could say it either way.
R: In an earlier session I was getting the sense that if one were to look at what I’m calling the totality of the energy who’s speaking here in terms of individual energies, we would be talking about 30 or so. Somehow a number that came up.
F: That was what was there then. It’s different at any given time. From a certain point of view it’s true, but from another point of view it isn’t at all true. It’s difficult to know how to put it. Even when you are an individual, you’re not. And you’re not a unit. You are a collection of things, and at the same time you’re only a part of something larger. The whole idea of a unit is just a convenient fiction. You, for instance, comprise billions of cells and over the lifetime of your body there’s no unity to it, if you wanted to look at it that way. You understand? It’s just a flow.
R: Units come and go, yes.
F: Yeah. Sure. Now, you have somewhat more stable organs that are composed of these cells, and all of that. Societally, we can say, well, this village is composed of x number of so-called individuals, all of whom are born and die and move and all sorts of things. So it flows, too. And to carry the analogy one more step, you are part of something which lives and dies many times in different places, and so there too there’s flow. In a very real sense there is no individual in the way that it looks to you because you see everything in time-slices. If you could only see it not sliced, you’d look like a worm, sort of, a long, long, long thing that goes on.
You get the idea. You’re attempting to see us as individuals, and we can’t even see you as an individual except as “okay it’s more convenient to think of you this way.” That’s the best we can do on that for the moment. Maybe another question will bring it better.
R: Well, it’s very easy to understand the theory of this, but it’s very difficult to —
F: Exactly!
R: –organize our thinking around that. So that the questions come out with implications that we would rather are not there, but they are there.
F: Well, you are in time-space; you can stretch yourselves to envision it, or to imagine it, or to approximate it, but by the best gymnastics you can do mentally, you can’t do what we can do simply only because we’re just not in it. You will, of course, when you get here. Again. Till you leave again. [laughs]
R: Well, I’m intrigued by this point which seems reasonable and yet I don’t think that I really have ever thought of things this way, that theere where you are, you’re not just observing life or observing your existence or planning for a future life, but there’s an existence there that includes many activities in the same way there is here.
F: That’s right. It’s not just an intermission.
R: [laughs] Okay. And I asked this kind of question before, but I want to ask it again, because it’s such an intriguing question, and that is the question of assignments, or missions, or duties or whatever that you have at that level. I’ve gotten a sense that there are variations in what those assignments are, but I think that I’ve not got you to admit that there are assignments. [laughs]
F: Well, again, it depends on time and space. Supposing someone were to ask you, what’s your assignment for the 14th of January, past or future? Your whole day of the 14th of January is so –there’s so many things in it, and the relative importance of those things depends strictly on the person who’s judging them. You couldn’t answer the question except arbitrarily. And to answer it arbitrarily would be to misinform the person asking the question, because it would imply to them that the question made sense
R: [laughs]
F: in a context where it doesn’t. Okay? So you want us to say, well, we’re teachers, and there is an aspect of that, in a way, but — what if we said we were roofers? [they laugh]
R: But I have the sense that you have an assignment with Frank, so to speak; that he’s part of your group and while he’s living his life in the physical, that you have a certain relationship to him.
F: Now remember, we’ve said this is more a relationship of affinity than of assignment. Those that are closest in nature to what it is that he’s doing at a given moment will seem to be drawn there, but it isn’t like they’ve been assigned by someone else, or by themselves either for that matter. It’s more of an affinity, and it’s an ad hoc affinity, in a way. Now, some of us are connected more closely over time; that’s a different level of affinity. There could be an affinity of task, an affinity of soul. We’d rather not go into that any more at the moment but we can at another time. You have other fish to fry tonight. We’re only saying that we ourselves have many other things to do besides him. And again, because we’re not constrained in the way that you are, we can be with him and for him any time he needs us, whether he’s aware of it or not, without taking up all of our time. So —
R: I had understood that you had a similar role with others besides Frank.
F: Sure. Others of the same or a sim—Well, you are tempting us, but this is not a good night for this discussion. Let’s bookmark this on the question of spiritual affinity as opposed to task affinity, and we will be glad to answer this at another time, but it’s not the right night for this, for your reasons, not for ours. That is, for the constraints on you, not for the constraints on us.
R: Mm-hmm. Well, I’m going to ask one more question about that, and you may want to rule this out for later too, but I didn’t mean an assignment in the sense of being told to do this specific task or something
F: Yes, we know.
R: I only meant it in the sense of, in the existence that you’re now in, is there a specific purpose that you have as opposed to – You’re not purposeless.
F: You mean on the 14th of January?
R: No, I mean in an on-going way – take the time-dimension out of it – other than in this relationship to —
F: Could you answer that question if we asked it of you? If we said to you, do you have an on-going mission, or do you have even a center of gravity, so to speak – in this case, not just in this one lifetime but for yourself as a whole, would you be able to answer that question?
R: Well, I’d be able to take a stab at it for a current part of my life.
F: That’s right. But suppose it were for the whole thing.
R: Well, I’ve never been able to do other than what seemed like kind of fantasy stuff about purpose of the total life.
F: Well see, it isn’t the vagueness that’s the problem, it’s that what you’re doing slices what you are by time. And as we say, it’s natural, but to you what looks like a unit — Rita’s life – is not a unit. It can be seen as a unit, particularly if you’re stuck in space-time, but it isn’t really a unit, you see? So, once you got to the place where you didn’t see a part of yourself as if it were all of yourself, you’d find the question – as we find the question – pretty nearly unanswerable. Our mission is to be. Is to live. We’d be willing to consider that further sometime, but I don’t know what else we could say. At any given time one or another task might become more important, or might become, to the moment, more urgent. But over time, you’re going to find that growth is growth and it leads now here and now there.
[continued next post]