December 4, 2001
F: [Yawns]
R: You’re getting very relaxed, I see. Very good.
F: Someday you’re going to turn on the radio and there’ll be no show. [they laugh]
R: Well, one thing that’s already come up this evening is a concern Frank has about – I think it’s an over-focus on the individuality of perspectives rather than backing-and-forthing between that and the oneness perspective, is that it?
F: Well, that – yes. That’s close enough. What’s happening is that he is occasionally suffused in one viewpoint and finds it persuasive enough that he finds it difficult to remember the other viewpoint. Now, you might not think he would, after this time, but it’s still ingrained, and when he looks at the complexity of the systems that have been worked out working from the assumption of individuality, and sees these elaborate systems involving reincarnation and judgment and karma and apparent progressions of individuals, then harks back to our explanation of all of those individuals as being part of larger beings that are also monads, he finds himself a little at sea as to how both can be so, given that he sees nothing in our explanation that shows the other ways of seeing things from a different point of view. In other words, it seems to him, or somewhat seems to him, that our unitary description doesn’t exactly contradict the multiple description, it sort of goes off in another direction entirely. He sees little overlap there. That’s what’s distressing. And he merely points out a gap that remains to be filled. There are many things to be said, and that’s one of them.
For instance, we lightly touched on how a larger being — how an amoeba — might create a new life in space-time, chaining it to other ones or individually. Eeither way, that is, using part of its own essence that hadn’t been before, or chaining it through another life that had been before. And that gives a misleading impression, because it sounds like us bringing forth life that hadn’t lived before would make it kind of isolated and solitary. But that overlooks the fact that, of course, that life, even if it had never been on earth before, still connects with us, which connects with everything that’s been on earth before. And that’s perhaps not an obvious correlate. We thought it would be, but we still forget how easily things are seen as separate rather than connected, just from your mental habits. It’s not meant as a criticism, it’s meant as a description of the state in which you find yourselves, the mental environment, shall we say.
So, we would advise that he just cool it, that it’s very good to ask those questions and bring up the perplexities. It’s, though, a little bit — not quite useless — but it’s needless friction to worry about it quite so much. It’s easier just to ask the question and see what happens, than it is to mull over it and go, “well, what if they don’t have an answer,” or, “ what if it doesn’t work?” You see? That’s all. The long and the short of it is, anything you can ask us we can answer, and supposing our answer was, “we don’t know,” it’d still be better than you sitting around wondering, “oh, God, do I dare ask a question,” which he tends to do somewhat. Not a lot, but somewhat.
If he’ll come loaded for bear next time with some specific questions about ways in which he thinks that our scheme doesn’t overlap with what he sees, we’d be delighted to answer. That means that that will have come to the top of the stack, and that would be a perfect — You see. There can’t be a wrong time for a question. All right?
R: All right. This will be depend on Frank trying to pose those kinds of questions that will fill in that gap.
F: That’s right. And tell him there’s only one way to do it right. [they laugh] There’s only one path that’s good.
R: I’ve been reworking some of the first chapters, and very aware there that we’re talking about the whole point of this looking at things from the two perspectives, and it’s very much there, but I can see that it would have been very easy for us to slip into language that‘s a bit more familiar to us, and concepts obviously based on an individual–
F: Well, remember, too, that we said at one point that sometimes perplexities would arise in you, or fears or doubts or whatever, for seemingly no reason; that our dealing with them will prove very helpful for people who will read this. So sometimes, the deck’s being stacked in a different sense. [pause] There’s your alibi.
R: So I assume you‘re planning this all along.
F: Well — the straightforward answer to that – you may have heard this before – is yes and no. The “yes” is, yes, we have a sense of how to shape this in such a way as to make it most useful and accessible to the people who will follow it. The “no” is, it isn’t planned without you, it’s planned with you. We’re going to continually repeat, it isn’t a question of us manipulating you, it’s a question of us manipulating us, if you wish to look at it that way. You don’t remember the planning in your daytime phases perhaps, but you’re in on the planning all the time and you’re willing participants. And that takes away the element of manipulation, although, at your level, to the degree that you can’t remember your participation on this side, it can only be seen as manipulation. There’s enough suspicion of manipulation going around in your culture now that we think it’s worthwhile to remark on this. Which, if we were only dealing with you and Frank, we wouldn’t bother.
R: Well, one of the things I’ve noticed is that the humor takes that form, that when we say we had thought of something, you suggest perhaps that we hadn’t thought of it, so that adds to the perspective that we’re being – that we have some minor part in this, somehow.
F: Well, you can’t have a minor part in it. You are as much a part of it as we are. If you were writing with a pen, it’d be like saying your third finger had a minor part in writing. Do you see what we’re saying? Even though it seems separate to you, you’re as much a part of it as we are because you have to be. “We” is “we.”
R: Yes. I was just speaking about the humor, I assume, has meaning and it often takes that form.
F: Well, the reason we do that is because — besides the fact that we find it entertaining ourselves — we think it’s important that you develop the habit of mind of not making distinctions between what you think, as if that was something discrete, you know, separate — [chuckles] Frank got us lost on the grammar on that one. Wait a minute.
We’re trying to emphasize that what you think is not local to yourselves, any more than what we think is local to ourselves, really — although we probably have never thought of that. We’re all the same thing, thinking together.
Let’s see if we can come up with a fireworks-quality analogy, because it would be very well if we could come up with a nice visual image you could remember. You know how we’ve said on our side — at one point, we made it as marbles in a frying pan, all touching and filling the whole space but each a different marble. [pause] Well, supposing — it’s difficult too. The analogy hasn’t come yet. Well, wait a minute.
What we’re looking for is an analogy which would show that we’re still all together, but that some pieces of us are separated by something which makes those pieces not aware that they’re part of it. But we would need an analogy that didn’t imply separation or space or an actual barrier rather than a relative one. You know what? The closest analogy we can think of is actually an osmotic filter where you have saltwater one side and plain water on the other side. Perhaps if you look at the veil between us as a filter — but not a very good analogy. [pause] In fact, it’s a downright terrible analogy. [laughs] We’ll think about it and let you know.
R: Well, there are points at which fresh water and saltwater come together which occur where there’s no clear dividing line. So perhaps it’s that sort of thing.
F: Well, we’re looking for something to give the analogy of a massive unit, one part of which doesn’t recognize its unity, for a physical objective reason, but it’s not really obvious. [pause] It may come to me in the middle of your asking a different question.
R: I am interested in what we were just talking about, though, because you suggested that we have given you some ideas — one or two — whereas you’ve been giving us lots of ideas all along, some of which we thought were our ideas, true enough.
F: Well, for all you know, we stole your ideas and called them ours. [laughs]
R: Well, that’s a possibility. [they chuckle] But since we’ve been focused on this individuality — and Frank feels, uncomfortably so — that suggests that it’s more apt to be coming from us.
F: That what is more apt to be coming from you?
R: The kinds of questions that we raise that represent our topics here. Frank’s uncomfortable that those are too focused on our individual perception, a perception of us as individuals.
F: No. That’s not what he meant. He’s uncomfortable with our explanation. He doesn’t think our explanation takes into account all the evidence of things that happen to people that they’ve reported individually. He’s not concerned with your questions at all. He’s concerned with our answers! And – but go ahead.
R: Well, I don’t know that I’m understanding that now. Let’s talk a little more about it.
F: All right. You may know that his bias is, that if anything has been believed over a long period of time by a lot of people of a serious nature, there’s something to it. Whether it’s right or not, it may be distorted or incomplete, but there’s something to it. So, coming from that point of view or from that, say, emotional mindset — it’s not a contradiction, although it sounds like one — coming from that emotional mindset, he looks at our explanation and says, “well, what does this have to do with repetitive reincarnations, leading a person to grow and to work out their salvation, so to speak?” Most anything you can read, study, hear about or even experience comes in the container of “individual.” An individual coming out of time-space, even if that individual, based in time space, then goes to the other side and is no longer in time space, it’s still perceived as an individual and still perceived as returning on this side again, you know, being born from one side and then being born to one side. And so within all of that, he feels it’s way too much elaborated to be a misunderstanding from your side, and he doesn’t quite see how our exposition from our side can be accurate in light of all that experience. That’s the nature of this.
R: Well, let’s go back over some of this material that we’ve talked about, and see if that brings any light into the subject. We’ve talked about, as we make choices on this side and spend our lives here making choices, we’ve become increasingly individualized, as we said. And at some point we move across with this now representing this individual who has made all these choices and has somehow sharpened the focus of who they are, become more crystallized. I don’t know if that’s right.
F: That’s good. And let us interrupt you for a moment. Now, he sees that as that’s the end of the story as far as we’ve gone, and how does that tie in. He can see that being one of the pieces of grass in the field. And the question that he rises, although he hasn’t put it as clearly as you’ve just put it, is, “well, then what?” Because from our way of describing things, he can’t quite see how that same individual, — well, he would see it as an individual — can then come back into this side again without — he’s having a problem —
Oh, we just found out how to answer it, too. We just thought of how to answer it. You could look at our side and your side being divided by a veil or, you know, a divider, and being stitched. And the thread that stitches from one side to the other is the individuals coming back and forth. [chuckles] It’s not at all necessary for us to say, “you, Rita, when you come over to our side and give us the flower that was Rita, –.”
Ah! That’s where he’s –. Okay. Well, we just found something interesting.
You see, he sees that the flower that’s Rita will be here. Is here from our point of view but will be when you get here, from your point of view. And then he’s saying that that’s not compatible with your going back again. But, of course, your underlying energy is not the same thing as your personality expressed in your life. The energy goes back, the personality doesn’t go back. But that’s not been clear to him. You see it?
R: No, we’ve said that here, though, that personality does go back, but my understanding was that it joined the amoeba, so to speak, and in that sense became part of this overall energy that takes some of the individualized personality aspects out of it.
F: We’re going to get confused unless we say – let’s call your side the individual side, and we’ll call ours the unitary side. The personality dying from the individual side and being born into the unitary side has an underlying essence, an underlying energy that came, of course, from us. It went into your side.
Okay, let’s pretend it was the first time through. The energy left the unitary side, dressed itself in a personality on the individual side, and returned from the individual side to the unitary side dressed in the personality that it acquired and polished during that lifetime. When it reaches the unitary side, that personality is completed. That personality is then a part of us. The underlying energy from that personality can then stitch through again over to the individual side and it will, obviously — or perhaps not obviously to you, if not let us know – but, to us it’s obvious, it will have a different personality rather than the same one. It will have been born at a different time in a different place with a different set of attributes. That’s the whole point of it. So if you look –
Now, his Division of Consciousness book should explicate this for him very easily, actually. If you look at the human personality in any given lifetime, that personality is here as part of the field of grass. You don’t recycle Rita. The personality Rita will not become part of something else in another time and space on the individual side. The essence Rita, either mixed or unmixed, will come over to the individual side again and pick up another personality as it has before. The person living on Mars is not Rita.
R: Okay.
F: The essence of the person living on the person on Mars and Rita, may be the same essence, you see. Now, what will confuse us a little is that everything coming from us could be considered the same essence, but that isn’t quite what we mean. We’re pretending that different parts of ourself are a little more individual than – than you might – than -.
There’s nothing wrong with subdividing our self into selves. Let’s do it that way and say that your self picks up a personality, develops it, leaves it off, goes back in, picks up another one, not necessarily always in the physical, not necessarily, certainly always on earth, all right? Does that aid the situation at all?
R: Well, yes. It does. But when you say ourselves, I’m not sure – how does this relate to the amoeba?
F: The selves?
R: You’re saying saying ourselves, and there’s the amoeba form, and then there’s our individualized form here on earth.
F: Yes. In that case, I was referring to we. We was referring to I. [laughs] We’re referring to the unitary side.
R: Yes.
F: Any of you, any of your individual essences, that is to say the essence that right now is Rita, the essence that right now is Frank, any of those may be, for the focus of convenience, considered one cell of the unitary body. And that cell can come in, pick up a personality, drop a personality, pick up another personality, that kind of thing.
R: Okay. Well, we’ve talked about before, we’ve used a language of when that cell returns, it moves back into the amoeba.
F: Yes. And see, the cell, the energy, the essence –.
Okay. We need to think about this a little bit. You see, what we’ve done could be looked at by -. A moment here.
There’s not a real good analogy, but supposing you learned French. The essence of you has nothing to do with whether or not you learned French. But the personality learned French. The acquisition of the skill is at a different level than the maintenance of your being. We don’t mean your life. So, in other words, what you are remains unchanged no matter what happens to you, in a way. In a way. It’s not literally true, but it’s close. So that if you get sixteen academic degrees and pile up three fortunes and get on the cover of Time magazine, it doesn’t really affect your essence directly. It will, in the sense of perhaps affecting the choices you make, but you understand, we’re trying to make a distinction between the essence that is at the base of your life and all of the personality-oriented superstructure, that is acquired. That superstructure –
No, that’s too mechanical an explanation.
What we are attempting to come up with is a distinction between what is almost an artifact — that is to say, that personality and that lifetime pattern — and the underlying energy that was responsible for creating the artifact. The life that became Franklin Roosevelt is the artifact. The individual part of ourselves that went in and stoked the boilers and ran the ship during the creation of that life, is not the same as the artifact. Without it there could have been no artifact, but it was not the same. So when the Franklin Roosevelt lifetime — which includes the mind, the spirit, the body, the acquisitions, the character problems and all that — that’s not the same as the essence, but here, again (we’ll take a little bit of a turn here. Here we’ve found another problem that’s bothering him.) if one looks at Franklin Roosevelt — to give a neutral example — as a person who came into this existence on your side with potential problems to deal with, as we’ve said, dealt with those problems well or badly, and went back on our side again, the assumption is, “okay, that underlying energy has to come in and deal with those remaining distortions.” In other words, supposing it came into this life with sixteen issues and left on the other side with either ten issues or twenty issues, depending on your opinion of how he did, what happens to the accounting system, is the question. If the artifact that is the life of Franklin Roosevelt is not the same as the energy, where’s the accounting of it? Wouldn’t you say that’s sort of a problem?
R: Well, let me ask this. If what comes into this side originally, before any of the attributes that develop a character on this side, if the actual energy that comes over, comes over from the amoeba, that basic energy, the essence you were calling it, which sounds like a good term with me, through the choices that it makes on this side, becomes an essence with a lot of attributes added — situations met and maybe solved or not solved, whatever. But returns to the amoeba with a lot of components that weren’t there initially.
F: That’s right. That’s the flower that it brings back, or the gift.
R: Then if we think of the essence being again represented in another lifetime, coming forth again there so to speak, I’m not sure what Frank’s problem is with that.
F: Well, his problem would be that most people would describe it as “he came in empty the first time, at the end you came in maybe at minus four” or whatever. In other words, they’re keeping a score. The assumption is, then, that something has to carry that score back into your side, into the individual side, and make it all come out even.
R: Because of karma?
F: Well, maybe not “because of,” but that would be their description, yes. They’re trying to make it all come out even at the end.
R: And the even means an equal number of positives and negative –
F: Or smoothed out anyway, yes, depending on their points of view.
R: Except where you said that in any one person, that doesn’t have to balance out. You can have an excess of positives or negatives.
F: That’s right. And not only that, the whole accounting system is skewed by your culture’s inclination to look at everything as individual at a time when that’s not appropriate. So supposing you’re talking about carrying ice cubes – I don’t know why this analogy came, but let’s see if it works. Supposing you’re talking about carrying ice cubes over to our side from your side, and you, when you come over with the rest of Rita, bring fourteen ice cubes and Frank brings twelve ice cubes, of a slightly different flavor. And someone else ten, and blah blah blah. And we’ve got to get those ice cubes over on the individual side again, if you want to look at it that way.
In other words, what we’re trying to say is, people have a sense that if you make bad choices, so- called, you have character warping in there, and you need to un-warp that character in order to get perfection. So what they think is that it’s an endless accounting system until you get it even, until you get it all smoothed out and right. Okay. This what we’ve seen repeatedly.
R: And the assumption is that it has to be done within one individual.
F: Exactly! And that’s the bad assumption. So that, in other words, Hitler has to go through another fourteen lifetimes of presumably being a saint until he expunges the last of his guilt for what he did. But it isn’t personal that way at all. The essence underneath the Hitler personality isn’t guilty of anything.
R: Yes. So I’m not sure how this balancing need comes up.
F: [chuckles] Because it’s true that we tend to balance it out, certainly over time, but it isn’t true that one piece of essence –.
Suppose you were players in a repertory theater, and each actor takes a different role, there’s no necessity for one actor to take as many good roles as bad roles. And there’s certainly no necessity after he took a role as a selfish person to take a role as an unselfish person. And as complex as it is, you would never have it come out even. You know, although that would keep the game in play. But, you see, people are getting glimpses, but because they are inappropriately putting them into individual analogies — not even thinking they’re analogies, but thinking it’s accurate — they’re drawing the wrong conclusions. So that, for one thing, many of these have as a silent, sometimes not even noticed, assumption, that the whole purpose of all of this is to lead people to be moral and good, and that enlightenment equals being “good.” (Put good in quotes.) But in actual fact, it doesn’t have a thing to do with that.
R: At the individual level or –
F: Well, –
R: There’s apparently group karma as well as individual karma, that the Buddhists talk about, anyway.
F: But is the group any realer than the individual? That would be the point we would make. It’s real from a certain point of view, that’s what we would say. But if – well, – well, now, all right. Let’s look at this a little bit.
Take as a group karma, the United States. And say that in the United States they put all races of people in slavery. They exterminated or certainly persecuted other races and got them out of the way. They systematically exploited whole classes of people to keep them poor and out of the way. And when they fought wars, they occasionally had their own atrocities, as everyone else does. So take all that. Now, does this mean that that group is then going to have to suffer the equivalent of that? Or does it mean that if it doesn’t suffer the equivalent of that it’s going to have to at least fully understand wherein it went wrong and resolve not to do it again? And in that case, how would that be?
Or, if one is identifying for the moment with the victim of any of these things, does that mean that that victim was being paid back for something they had done earlier or will be paid back in the future? You see what we’re saying, the same dilemmas that come when you look at it individually are even more so in group senses. However, it isn’t exactly wrong. There is a tendency to balance things out, but it isn’t “ this must balance to the last jot and tittle” kind of thing, and it isn’t a thing of getting even. And it isn’t even a thing of making the scales balance. It’s more like it just tends to balance out because things tend to balance and they don’t tend to imbalance. Do you understand what we’re saying? Imbalance actually requires a push.
R: Okay. I see what you are saying –
F: So that a country that tends to do – well, again, we’ll stick with the country for the moment, but every country does good and does bad. And, of course, what’s good and what’s bad depends on the actions of 50 million observers, internal and external. How can anybody try to make that scale balance? It’s just that things are followed by other things. People as individuals — that’s what we’ll call them — affect each other because they’re all one thing. All right. All right. Let’s look at this for a little bit, if you’re interested in this.
As people in bodies, you’re individuals. As people in groups, you are not necessarily really individual because you interact with each other so, and you’re so intertwined even physically, that you can’t consider yourself an individuals really except by not looking, and then, that doesn’t even count the fact that, on our side, we’re all connected through you, you know, – or you’re all connected through us, is what we should say. Well, just as the airplane attacks in September led people to react — everybody didn’t react in the same way; they all reacted out of their own backgrounds. To the degree that’s your in the same society sharing the same media, sharing the same history or understanding of history, the same — everything about it, your habits, your things that are taken for granted. That just pushed you toward reacting more or less the same way. Someone in Peru would react quite differently from someone in Canada to the same given event because you react against something, you don’t react in a vacuum. And what you react against is what you have become, which is shaped by your history.
It has a lot less to do with balancing the scales than it does with just “every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” although we’re not saying that literally, of course. [pause] Have we lost anybody in the thickets here?
R: [chuckles] Well, I’m trying to figure out whether this was a treatise on why our original concepts are wrong or why they’re right.
F: It’s more like, all the concepts that have ever been formed are very, very valuable clues that will look –. And Frank’s got the direct intuition on this one, even if he doesn’t know how to pursue it — and that is, you take those clues and you run them through a new way of viewing, and it gives you tremendous data. So it’s quite true that if you could go through all of your scriptures, starting with a different point of view, you would find the sophistication and the precision would be vastly enhanced, because it’s already been worked out for you, you see, and all you have to do is correct for the biases. Now, of course, what that means is you’re putting your own bias in, but that’s the only way you can come up with a concept, or the only way you can explicate one.
[yawn.] It’s starting to be like work, now.
We still haven’t quite found a way to make that analogy. If you had a bag of potato chips and a few of the potato chips were individually wrapped, but they were still in the bag –. That’s still not right because of the bag, you know, because of the individual wrapping. But it’s not an obvious — it has to do with a phase –. Well, okay. There we go. There’s your analogy. We’ll do a phase shift!
If you had water at 32 degrees more or less, and some of the water had — that’s where we started with ice cubes, isn’t it? Okay. Some of the water had become ice cubes. Assuming they had a mentality, those ice cubes might not think they had much in common with the water and, in fact, if they were only acclimated to recognize ice cubes, they wouldn’t even know they were in the water. If you will look at the unitary side as the water and the individual side as ice cubes, you can see that here you have something that’s identical in nature but in a different physical state, which makes them look very un-identical. It’s also possible, if the water had mentality, the water might not recognize the ice cube as water. We’ll leave that for another day.
R: That’s very good.
F: You see. What we just said is very revolutionary when you think about it a little bit. The water might not recognize the ice cubes.
So. It took half the night, but we came up with an analogy. We knew we could do it. But if you can take those ice cubes and turn them into fireworks — [they laugh].
R: Well, do you want to leave that that way? The water might not recognize the ice cubes?
F: For the moment, we do, actually. Mainly because some people will wonder “what in the world can that possibly imply?” And as we said before, it’s better to puzzle at something yourself than to be given it, because even if you got the wrong answer, the teasing it out is a worthwhile process, whatever a “wrong answer” is.
R: Frank’s been working on the information from the sessions in the lab with Skip, and has come up with what he believes is an essay based on those.
F: [laughs] He’s hoping that he’s going to come up with an essay. What he’s come up with so far is three pages of typed notes. But he will.
R: And the thought is to keep those sessions separate from these sessions.
F: Well, the thought is that the reporting of the surround of those sessions and the content of the sessions can be done in a pretty concise manner, which will sort of set the stage for the next stage, which is yours. Even though it included visions and really going off into new territory and being given stuff more, rather than responding to questions, it can be described more simply and quickly, so it should really be the porch to the house. It should be relatively short. Not over 500 pages. [chuckles]
R: But is there something to be said about the implications of that chapter or those experiences for what we’ve been doing in here.
F: It’s an integral part of what you’re doing here, yes. And that’ll be obvious, although he doesn’t know it yet. I mean, he assumes it, but doesn’t know where that comes from. In other words, those sessions were very, very important in turning him to this work. And they have very important clues in them as to what people can do to tune themselves. And the main value he’s going to get out of it is to remember what was in there, because he’s really ignored and forgotten it. And so now, as today and yesterday, he’s beginning to remember to do some of the things that he learned to do and forgot, you see.
R: But it is all available to him.
F: Oh, sure.
R: As he goes through those –
F: Well, the transcripts were there, he made the notes on the transcripts. It’s just, the immediacy of later work took him away from what he learned there. Every week, you know, was a new nail driving out the old nail. And now it’s very much the process of collecting them and looking at them and saying what they mean. And then, putting them into words.
R: So is that something that should have been done before this?
F: Oh, no. No. This is perfect timing. Perfect timing because that won’t take long at all, just as yours isn’t going to take long. And then you go on to the next part which is this sequentially. We told you, you can do it easily. Just be irresponsible.
R: It’s sort of fun sometimes.
F: It’s supposed to be fun. Imagine what we’re doing.
R: [chuckles] I’ve interpreted it to mean, sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can’t. I can’t.
F: Well, yes, that’s true. But, you know, in a way, that’s as bad as comparing yourself to others. Which you don’t do much, I don’t think, but people do. But, in a way, comparing yourself on one day and you’re comparing yourself on another day isn’t much of an improvement, you know. There’s no need to. Be gentle with yourselves.
R: Okay.
F: Unless you don’t want to be.
R: My Buddhist daughter here was asking us to bring a question in.
F: We suggest you check the tape.
R: You think we should just what?
F: We’ll check the tape.
Frank: I wonder –. I don’t them doing that before. Let’s see how far we are.
[change sides of tape]
F: All right. Go ask that question again.
R: But we don’t have a question yet.
F: Oh, good.
R: We’re just thinking about it. I don’t know exactly how she asked it, but I know the meaning. The concept is that while we respect and honor all sentient beings, we note that there seems to be a difference that exists between human consciousness and the consciousness of other sentient beings. And the question is, is that so, then if so, can you speak about what the difference is?
F: [Teasing.] Like mother, like daughter. Notice that the sentence depends on the word “seems,” and that’s exactly true. The difference between humans and others seems to be absolute — that animals don’t have self-awareness, that plants don’t think, that rocks perhaps are not even sentient beings, depending on who the observer is. And we would say the difference is more seems than is. There is an absolute difference, and we’ll tell you what that is, but it’s not in absence of –.
Well, let’s just examine this a little bit. You’ve heard the concept that animals have group souls. And you remember that a while ago we discussed the difference between plants and rocks and animals and humans, and we described it as a difference in freedom. Remember? And that, as living beings — and you remember that we described everything as alive, even things like rocks that appear to you to be not alive. But that as living beings acquired greater degrees of freedom, they required a greater degree of local mind to, shall we say, manage the equipment. A flower needs enough locally oriented intelligence. Perhaps we should start with that definition, although we won’t finish there. The flower needs enough locally oriented intelligence to find the sun, to face the sun, to close up when it needs to and open up when it needs to, to extend its roots into the ground and to feel its way toward minerals, that kind of thing. A rock doesn’t need any of that. A rock’s intelligence, a rock’s sentience, has nothing to do with motion at all. It has to do with an entirely different thing and that is to feel itself within the matrix of everything that is. We’ll leave alone for the moment.
When you go beyond plants, the next step is animals, roughly, – there’s an intermediate step, but we’re not going to bother with that. The animal has beyond the needs that the flowers or the plants do. It also has the ability to move. Having the ability to move adds a whole ‘nother dimension of awareness necessary. It has the ability to procreate in ways –. How should we define sexual procreation? It has the ability to procreate by coming together with another of its own kind, physically, that is to say, to merge motions, to interact deliberately – let’s put it that way — with another of its kind, with all the consequences that follow, including kittens or puppies or whatever, and the care of them. All of that requires higher and higher amounts of intelligence.
Now, when you get, say, a dog, and a breed of dog, and that breed of dog is bred to perform a certain function, people are sometimes surprised at how intelligent the dog becomes, or appears, as though it were trained above a dog level of intelligence. And what has happened is, it has new requirements, and the abilities expand to meet the requirement.
Humans expand beyond animals in that they have the ability, more than any other thing, to use tools, to use hands. And we’re not quite talking about technology, although it sounds like we are, but the humans modify their environment more than any other being. And this is not, of course, by accident — the humans are required to modify their environment in order to survive and flourish and thrive. And that, once it got to a certain level, just took over and now they’re modifying it just because that’s what they do, that’s what they’ve become. Well, all of that requires greater and greater and greater adaptively, and requires greater presence of mind in ways that are being granted because they’re needed.
Now, living in a more complex society — in a society sufficiently –. Wait.
You’ve now modified your environment such that you couldn’t survive in it if you remained at that level and therefore, another level of intelligence has been required and therefore, is being supplied, and now you’re beginning to come across the group mind, you see. Not only your intuitions and what you call your extrasensory perceptions, but you are growing, as we told you, into the next stage, because you need to.
So we would say the simple answer to your question is, the difference between humans and others is a difference in the necessary faculties resulting from the additional abilities. Now, there’s a sidelight there, and that’s, if you will look at your cetaceans, the cetaceans are as intelligent as humans, but they don’t have the same requirements, because they can’t modify their environment and they don’t need to modify their environment, and, yet, look what’s happening. Because of that, they’re now in serious danger. Do you think that that will mean that they will be exterminated? That is to say, choose not to live here? Or do you think that that will lead, and perhaps, is leading, to a radical redefinition of what they can do because of what they need to be able to do. That’s what we, in the trade, refer to as a broad hint. [they laugh]
We would say it’s a mistake to think there’s a difference in souls between humans and other species in the sense of “humans are more precious than others” or “humans are later in the developmental scheme” or anything like that. It’s more a specialization of function. And we would remind you, at the same time we’re saying all this, that the same larger being extrudes rocks, plants, animals, people, and cetaceans. In other words, there’s not an absolute difference between them from our side at all. The absolute difference is only on your side, and there are no absolutes.
R: I had the sense that you said that amoebas include all of these.
F: That’s what we just – yes. That‘s what we meant. In other words, that is to say, everything that is.
R: Yeah. The question was, the difference in human consciousness, does that offer anything that you –
F: Well, that’s what we were saying, that humans, because they need more consciousness, have it. And because now that they’re altering their environment enough, that forces them to have a new kind of consciousness that is being developed. But it’s not a question of them having been a different order of being from everything else. It’s difficult because you don’t have the words to make the distinction, we don’t think, but some people think animals are here without the rights the people have.
(Terrific, inexplicable, audible interference on tape lasting 66 seconds)
R: — the plan that we have.
F: That’s right.
R: They have different needs for freedom.
F: That’s right.
R: And so, it doesn’t essentially explain anything, it’s just that’s part of the plan.
F: What’s to be explained?
R: Well, someone decided that we need to be set up on gradations of freedom.
F: [pause] Say that’s true. Then what?
R: Well, if that weren’t part of it, then we wouldn’t have to have the – I mean, that seems like from your description the basic dimension, and that having decided that, then you have different characteristics based on how much freedom that you have.
F: That’s right. That’s right. And the freedom is neither a gift, nor the lack of freedom a punishment. It’s just, a rock doesn’t need those kinds of freedom, and it has its own life. Or a cloud. Now, you’d never think of a cloud as having intelligence, but the intelligence comes from the other side as a totally different kind of intelligence. It has no sexuality, it has no reproduction, it has no development, you know, over time. A cloud is and then it isn’t, you know. But that doesn’t mean it’s not intelligent while it’s there. It doesn’t mean it’s not reporting to central control, so to speak. All right? Not the kind of intelligence you could realize, and it can’t count two and two is four, but it’s still alive as everything else is alive. And alive implies sentient, although that doesn’t appear obvious to people. There’s no –.
You know what? We’ll go back a way. We talked one time about the ecology and how everything in your ecology is necessary. Remember that? We said that no matter what your ecology was, whether you’re on Alpha Centuri with a totally different life system or you’re on earth, whatever the ecology is, everything in it is needed. And if something leaves, it’ll change the whole thing. It won’t change just one part of it, it’ll change all of it. It has to.
Well, we don’t quite understand your perplexity. Perhaps it’ll clarify it just to say that you need plants, the animals need the plants to live. The air needs the plants to help regenerate itself. The plant doesn’t need, and couldn’t abide, being able to walk around. Therefore, it doesn’t need the localized focus of intelligence that follows the ability to walk around.
R: All right. Now, since you said that all of these forms are in the amoeba, is there some developmental scheme here at work at all?
F: No. That’s a mistake. You don’t start off as a plant, and by being a good boy or by learning your lessons [laugh], then move on to being an animal.
Well, – well, – well – [pause] you could almost say that, actually, because what happens is the essence moves over — [pause]
If you choose to look at is as, each bit of essence being an individual piece that retains its individuality — which is not very accurate — if you looked at it that way, we suppose you could then see it as, “okay, it came over again, dropped what it had done, had learned a little bit, and could come in and do more,” but that’s not an accurate picture of it. I mean, that’s really based on the idea of going in and learning and then developing and then coming in and learning more and developing and finally, you’ll be a star, my boy. But there are so many wrong definitions involved in that, including the idea that it starts ignorant.
R: Okay. But you’ve said that — I guess maybe I’m inferring this — that the human being has ways of becoming increasingly individualized in ways that perhaps a rock does not, and therefore, that what we take back to your side is bound to be somewhat different than what a rock takes back.
F: Well, let’s say this, although this will sound strange to you. You may regard the rock as the personality and the essence underneath the rock as essence in the same way that your essence is other than your personality. Perhaps that will either clarify or make it more obscure, I’m not sure which.
R: Is it so that, as I just assumed, that a human being has more ways of becoming individualized than a rock?
F: [long pause] Wow! Even to explain why we’re having a hard time explaining that, must be a major explanation. Okay. We’ll try. We take a little of our essence and extrude it as a rock. And let’s forget about the rock. Let’s make it a plant because it’ll be much easier for you to visualize it being born and dying. So we come in and we decide to be a daffodil. The piece of essence of us that – although really, it would be more accurate to say that piece of essence becomes all daffodils than to say it becomes a daffodil, but leaving that to the side — the piece of us that becomes a flower, does the flowering, does its thing, returns, and the flower is the flower. You know what we’re saying. What the flower’s life was is the gift, okay, just as what your life is, is the gift.
Now, the essence that returns, if you want to keep it separate, has learned how to be a good flower. It has had first hand the experience of germinating and growing and dying down, not a big lesson, but it has had that lesson. And perhaps, being a very intelligent piece of essence, after it’s done that a few times with different plants, it generalizes it and says, “well, okay, I got the whole concept now.” And then it moves on to animals. And after it does enough animals, then it moves on to humans. I think a lot of people think that way.
The trouble is, that assumes the essence began as ignorant and it assumes that the essence is here to learn. What the essence hasn’t done is learn. What the essence has done is chosen. And even as a daffodil is choosing this and that. You might not think a daffodil’s choices mean much, and perhaps they don’t, certainly from your complicated point of view. But if you choose to continue to regard that piece of essence as separate and say that that essence then went back in and learned other things — its underlying awareness was never ignorant. Okay? Just as your underlying awareness is never ignorant. The part of you that still connects with us that’s –.
You know how we’ve said that when you move into your life, it’s almost as though a barrier drops, and it’s hard for you, in your life, to remember our end? Well, nonetheless, there’s that part of you that knows all of that, even if you don’t have good access to it, and that part’s in the flower, too, and the rock, too, and the plant. So it isn’t a question of an ignorant little bunny learning to do things, nearly as much as it is a very as-wise-as-anything-else piece of myself, coming in and enjoying the experience of being a flower, and enjoying the experience of being a bunny, or whatever. Now, it’s true, you can’t have an experience without learning from the experience, probably, but the emphasis is not on the learning but on the experiencing.
R: I guess we think of plants as so directly inheriting their characteristics, essentially much more than the human being does. Not that the human being doesn’t inherit all sorts of things, but the change possibilities are so much greater.
F: Yes. You have more degrees of freedom. But the plant’s life is a little more complicated than you think it is. They share emotions. They share – how should we say, not attitudes, exactly, but they share -. You know that plants sort of use their own chemical extrusions to war against things they don’t like and to protect themselves. You know all that.
R: And respond well to kinds of atmospheres around them.
F: Yes. And the main atmosphere they respond to is love, which should tell you how little a difference there is between you and them. The difference is mainly in the degree of freedom. Now, it may occur to you that a degree of external freedom may involve servitude to the things that you’re free to do, and the degree of external constraint may give you much greater freedom because there are things you don’t have to think about. No flower spends its time making a living. No person can be free of the ideas of self-protection and of self-development and planning and those kind of things that surround you. Or, if they are free of it, it’s because they are incapable of functioning at your level when they are in institutions or their families are protective of them. Someone with Downe’s Syndrome or someone who’s retarded or someone who’s profoundly what you call handicapped. What this may be and often is, is a greater level of internal freedom because they are bound from other things. You might even – now, this is slightly fanciful, but you might, just for the purposes of thinking about it — consider that everything has the exact same degree of freedom, and if they are constrained externally, it may be an outside sign of greater internal freedom. A cetacean has great freedom. The are, perhaps, the most fortunate people on your planet because they have great internal and external freedom. They can’t affect their environment, and they don’t really have to worry much about that. They have to worry about protecting themselves and protecting their young and all that, but that’s really about the end of it, whereas you have so many cares.
And, that very difficulty is your biggest gift, you see. That very difficulty provides the need for you to grow, which allows you to grow. It’s obvious to us. We know it’s not obvious to you.
R: And so that the freedom implies the need to handle the freedom.
F: Yes. And sometimes it’s a great freedom to be unable to move. A rock that has absolutely zero external freedom has 100% total internal freedom. Now, you’ll never interface with that. Well, you could interface with the rock, once you get past, “am I making this up?” [chuckles] And we will tell you that if you ever do, the way you interface with a rock will very much surprise you, although Frank’s already learned this, and forgotten it twice, because crystals are rocks, after all. That is, you interface with them through emotion. And you interface with them by attempting to — and you need to do it somehow the best you can — go through, go around, destroy, dismantle, evade your own mental structure that tells you it’s only a rock. If you will perceive the rock heart-to-heart without preconceptions, you’ll surprise yourself, because the rock has absolute internal freedom. You just don’t see it. You’re internal freedom is probably less than a rock’s, although you’re external freedom is more, and some may be the same. We’re not saying any of that is hard and fast. It’s just for the sake of your seeing the variables in play. Parenthetically, we think that was a pretty good answer.
R: Well, I’ve had the experience of feeling that I was communicating with the mist, for example, and feeling quite successful at being able to communicate, interact. And so I’m feeling like perhaps a lot of human beings can choose some form of, what seem like inanimate–.
F: [laughs] Inanimate?
R: Oh, yes. [laughs]
F: Now, we would suggest to you that if you’ll cast yourself back one or two years, to when the Germans used to worship in oak groves back in Caesar’s time, that they were very close to that same sense. That to go from communicating with mist to communicating with the unseen spirits — which you also do — is a very small step. And what you’re doing, in a way, is closing the circle. You’ve come the very, very long way around to be able to do what the rocks can do, only you can also do what you can do that they can’t do. [pause] In a sense this is what your Bible means when it talks about angels being more restricted than humans, that the humans are going to be placed above the angels. They weren’t exactly placed above them, but you grew above them because of the various lacks you’ve developed.
Not finished yet.
R: Okay. I think I have run out of the things I wanted to ask about. Is there anything that you would like to add to this discussion?
F: Only to suggest that you might have a question or two about the book, and if you don’t that’s fine. And we have great confidence in the project. We don’t think we’re going to have near the trouble you think you are. But if you had any questions, we would be glad to make something up.
R: I don’t have any specific questions about that right now.
F: Okay. [yawn.] We will see you next time.
R: Next time.