[continued from previous post]
R: Mm-hmm. Let me ask about another one of the energies that Frank has dealt with, Joyce, who I think was suffering when she died. He has had the experience of going through the Monroe process, of moving her to Focus 27 and releasing her because of the sense he had that she was stuck somewhere along the line. Now, how does this sort of thinking sit with you?
F: You mean how does it square with what we’re telling you.
R: Yes.
F: Well, just parenthetically, it isn’t that she was suffering, it’s that her suffering, combined with the painkiller she was using, disoriented her, so that so that she didn’t notice when she moved over.
OK, it’s a big question, a worthwhile question. We don’t know that we’ll be able to — well, we’ll chip away at it, let’s put it that way.
You have such things as ghosts, and presences, that sensitive people can feel. And those ghosts or presences — well, we don’t need to go into ghosts. Patrick, okay? From the famous Patrick tape. We remember the question that you were talking about, about since when you drop the body the barrier with the upper part of you — the upstairs, the rest of us — is dissolved, why can anybody get stuck back here? And the best way to put it might be to say that it’s a habit of mind. Patrick, because he wasn’t aware that he had died — the answer will be a little circular but bear with us — because he wasn’t aware that he had died and had therefore dropped the body and therefore was available to flow back into what was, had flowed back on our side, but was not all aware of it. His attention was focused on earth. All we accomplished was to re-direct his attention.
It’s not question of movement. The spatial analogy sneaks into Focus 27 as it sneaks into everything else in your lives, but it’s not question of movement. Patrick was where Patrick always had been. He always lived and moved and had his being in us even while he had a body. When he dropped the body, though, his habit of attention was so fixed that he wasn’t aware of it, and he was what you call running a time loop, and just playing the same movie to himself all the time. The only thing that was accomplished in retrieving Patrick was a redirection of his attention.
Now, you all visualize it as holding someone’s hand or whatever — we don’t mean us in a mocking way at all — but you visualize it in a bodily way as escorting someone somewhere, that there is movement. But it isn’t movement; it’s just a movement of consciousness, so to speak. It’s a shining of the flashlight in the opposite direction, rather than toward the earth.
Any of the lives that you’re referring to, including your own, have a habit, a preferred method, an habitual method, of looking. Now, if someone is already spiritually inclined, or they are for some reason aware that there’s more than the earth, and something beneath and underlying the earth, and they are conscious when they die, it isn’t a problem. In whatever way they cognize the situation, they say to themselves, “I’m no longer in a body, now I’m on the other side.”
But if someone has a firm belief there is nothing on the other side, or for some reason is unaware that they have gone, then there is a problem. But in no case is it a matter of movement. So all of the people that you’re thinking of — again, in a spatial analogy — as being in Focus 24, 25, 26, 23, your default position is to think of them as spatially separated and being moved up to 27, is the way you usually put it, at which time — you’re not really sure what happens but you know they’re taken care of. We would argue there’s no movement there at all. We wouldn’t argue, we’ll just tell you. [Laughs.] There isn’t any movement, the only movement is in their mental structure. They suddenly realize, “oh, I’m not stuck here, things are not what I thought they were.”
How much does that help and how much does that hinder?
R: I think that helps. Skip wonders what is the whole purpose of the idea of rescuing someone, then?
F: Well, you are accomplishing a task. You are helping them to redirect their attention inward, that is to say, toward the inside of the crystal, toward us, rather than outward toward the material world. We don’t care which direction they look at, what we care though is their freedom. If someone is looking toward the earth and is still fixed on it, because they’re unaware there’s anything else, they’re not as free as they are if they’re looking down to the Earth because they’re interested. You see?
You actually are freeing them, literally, to be more themselves. Because they won’t have this tunnel vision that will eliminate all other possibilities. So to tie this with Dave that you talked of the other day, Dave was perceived in one of the focus levels, but only because he wants to be. He’s fully aware that he can do what he wants, you see. He’s not fixated on the earth, he’s where he is. That’s the difference between someone needing rescuing, and someone playing. We have no objection to playing.
R: Well then, it isn’t that the Monroe process isn’t on target, in a way, but it sounds like it would help to use a somewhat different language.
F: Well, there’s no reason to use a different language as far as what it’s doing. It was, after all, an inspired program. You don’t think it was an accident that Rosie McKnight and the Patrick tape came along and had the result that Bob set up Lifeline? That was needed and it is very helpful. What we would rather do than change the metaphors, is to make people aware that they are metaphors. Our metaphor is no more correct than theirs. It’s not literally a crystal over here, any more than it’s literally a place with chairs, you know? A metaphor is a metaphor because you can’t –. It’s a mystery because, looking straight at it, you can’t describe it. All we are trying to do is remind people that is a metaphor, and that reality is always a little “between the lines.” What Monroe is doing is fine.
R: That’s very helpful, thank you very much.
F: We are sorry to spoil our record. [They chuckle]
R: I want to ask about the compatibility between the Monroe system and our thinking here. What about the vision of Focus 27, a park-like place that energies can go when they’re on their way out of the body. Does that compute at all for you?
F: If you would say a non-threatening, attractive, tranquil place — as long as you understood that “place” is of course a metaphor also — we would have no problem with it. If you say a park, then it might be Central Park. Or it might be some park in Illinois somewhere. We’re only complaining about the misplaced concreteness, that’s all. Focus 27 does track your conscious existence, in a way that the present does not, and it certainly is accessible, and you’ve experienced it yourselves, but it doesn’t have furniture, it doesn’t have paved roads, it doesn’t have all of the misplaced concreteness that people give it.
[pause] Well, except that it does, in a way. Hmm. A moment here. We have to think about this.
R: I have another question, if that will help.
F: No, just give us a moment here. Well, here’s the thing. From where you are, it’s not concrete. When you come here, it’ll be certainly concrete. But it won’t be Portland concrete, you know. [chuckles.] It won’t be what you expect. We don’t know a better way to put that. Okay, your other question was?
R: Bob seemed to feel that what had happened to make that Focus 27 more concrete is that because of all the thousands and thousands of people who had come through that experience, the people themselves had, in the process of doing that, made a more concrete setting that was what people now found.
F: Yes, but, you see, your language is misleading you. And we just think of a good way to do this. You surely don’t envision that a Peruvian, and a Chinese, and a South African, and a Lithuanian would all have the same vision of what a park would be. That’s the misplaced concreteness of it, you see? If you say a place where people will be comfortable and at rest and non-threatened, yes. And you are right, it’s been placed there in that way. But it hasn’t been placed by a landscape designer, that’s what we’re saying. There is a tendency to mistake vibrations for concrete. There’s a tendency to mistake function for form. That’s the only thing we are trying to correct a little bit. Yes it’s concrete, psychologically. No it’s not concrete physically, because it isn’t physical. That’s all we are saying.
R: Would you suggest a change in the way that Focus 27 is presented in the Monroe programs?
F: No, it’s not important. It’s a distortion, but it’s a distortion that’s in the language, and it’s so unimportant next what they get from it, that’s it’s not worthwhile. The people who continually use Focus 27 won’t be particularly distracted by the language, and the people who use it and don’t know the difference, it won’t make to any difference to them. No, it’s not important.
R: Let me then ask about the concept involved in Focus 35, where presumably humans, having moved over, are interacting with other life forms. Does that sound like it is part of the process?
F: Suppose you thought of reality as a wok, or a bowl that slants concentrically and regularly inward and down. The very center is C1, matter. And as you go out toward the edge, you reach toward Focus 10, 12, 15, 21, 35. All of those are part of your physical matter reality, although you tend to think of them as not. All these focus levels and all are part of a very localized portion of the universe. That is to say, when you’re in Focus 27, you are still firmly in physical matter reality.
R: [pause] That’s hard for us to — Obviously, we’re doing it, taking ourselves to what seems like a physical reality in 27, that’s right.
F: Well, but see, even 34 and 35 and things beyond, you could look at — again, it’s a metaphor — you could look at as an ever more attenuated form of physical matter reality, with the most concrete and the most dense being in the middle, and then working its way out toward the edges, to where you are in an entirely different realm.
You see, the differences to you are so great between being in the body and sending your mind out to explore these other focus levels, that you tend to think of them as being differences in kind, but really, they’re only differences in degree. So 34/35, there are — let’s call them people, from (to you it would look like other realities) and this is perhaps as close as they can get to watching the big show down in the middle of the bowl. They have their own shows, but if they want to watch this show, this is about as close as they can get. It is just a matter of not being sucked into the density.
It’s a poor metaphor, but it’s serviceable.
R: Yes, I could get a good image of that.
F: Be aware, now, that when we say about matter being the thing in the center, we’re not talking about the earth, we’re talking about all physical matter. So that includes the galaxies, and the space between the galaxies, and all that. That’s all part of this thing in the center. We don’t want misplaced concreteness to say the earth is there, and, you know, the moon is maybe the equivalent of focus 10. [Laugh]. It’s not true. All physical matter reality is that very dense thing in the bottom of the bowl, and the mental states and the spiritual — freedom, let’s put that way — move outwards from that, but are a part of it.
R: Yes, certainly I have seen that temptation in 35, people describing things with the density of C1.
F: Well, the translation error in 35 is going to be so great, that anything you bring home is a gift.
R: [chuckles.] Okay, that sounds good. This is a little specific that I never have caught up with, and that is that you’ve made a distinction between time and duration on your side.
F: Well, we’re only doing that to try to defeat — was there more to the question?
R: I just wondered what — I don’t understand that.
F: Yes, we’re trying to defeat the ingrained bias of your language. Because if we say “there is no time,” your language tempts you to think “everything happens all at once, all piled up one each other.” And unfortunately, in a way that’s true. [Laughs.] But in a way it isn’t true, and that’s what we’re trying to preserve here. We don’t live in time in the way that you do, being dragged from moment to moment to moment, at predictable intervals, without any way to move forward or backwards. So we’re calling that “time,” and quite arbitrarily we’re calling what’s on our side of the line “duration.” That is to say, you can talk to us one day — so to speak — and then talk to us another day, and something will be different. The fact that they’re different, shows you that it’s not all one thing. But because you live in space-time, we don’t think there’s any way for you to envision that, except as a kind of a time. “They did think this, now they think that. They did say this, now they say that.” So, we tortured this word “duration” into a different meaning because your language, otherwise, will do the same thing to you in terms of time that the spatial analogies always do in terms of space.
R: Okay, so then the duration idea implies that there is a “before” and “after”?
F: Well, it more implies there’s a separation of states. If you had ice, steam, and water — three states of the same thing — and if you didn’t know which came first, there isn’t any question of duration involved there, but there is a thing about different states. Ice is different from water, is different from steam, even though they’re chemically the same thing. So, we’re trying to sneak this word duration in, and perhaps that’s a mistake, perhaps we should call it something else. There are separations of our consciousness –. Hmm. [pause]
Well, you know how we’ve said that you have a switching system to allow you to hold things in your mind while you move, with time? Well, we don’t have that necessity, and we don’t have the switching system. But we have a —
Well, a division by function, but that won’t tell you anything. A division by what we are, sort of.
[Pause.] See, you are accustomed to thinking of you yourself as one person. And there’s one person on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. You’re not accustomed to thinking of yourself as a different person on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, not to mention every moment of time in between. If you weren’t in time, you could do that. Just as we see it — you remember, we say that sometimes we have to go looking to see where you are in time? Well, it’s the same thing for us on this side, and we have no way of even remotely figuring out how to tell you about it. Sorry. It’s equivalent to that — but maybe something will come to us. Maybe if you ask the right question it’ll come to us.
R: We don’t like making you struggle.
F: [laughs] haven’t noticed that. We don’t mind struggling, it’s just that the concept is so firmly embedded in time in your mind and in your experience, and we can’t make it a spatial analogy without doing even worse damage to it. Well, maybe someday we’ll think of it. See, you heard that. Maybe someday. In other words, —
R: that’s a duration away.
F: well there’s another — [pause.]
The very concept of change implies some kind of duration, or implies some kind of alternate state, but it’s not movement, and so, you look at change and you think “Aha! That went from being this to being that.” And there’s nothing wrong with thinking of it that way, but you could easily think of it as — this will sound like the same thing to you — “it ceased to be this and became that.”
R: All right, I have another —
F: Good! [They laugh].
R: — another kind of area of the same thing to ask about, and that has to do with Frank’s career around this kind of material. Can you talk some about his role in presenting this sort of idea to the world?
F: You mean beyond what you’re doing right now?
R: Right.
F: Well, don’t underestimate that. His career is — one level of it is to actually hold it, because anything that one person holds inside themselves is available then to everyone, whether you know that or not. Anything one holds within oneself and then puts into some external form makes it easier for people to recognize that it’s available to them, and anything that one holds within oneself, puts into external form, and then goes up and down the land speaking to people about it, brings it to their attention so that they can recognize that it’s available for them.
You see what we’re saying? It becomes a matter of how much more immediate the results are. And of course everything is always under your choice. If he wants to just think about things, knowing that having put them together they’re there for others, but in a relatively inchoate state, because they haven’t been forged by talking about them, or meeting opposition, or even getting new points of view — any combination of those things is possible. If you ask us what he would enjoy doing, that is, what would be fulfilling for him, we would say, a combination of inner work and outer work is perfect; that’s why he’s on the boundary between the introvert and extrovert. Sometimes writing, sometimes speaking.
R: I’m asking about what it is he reports when he gives presentations to others. One way would be just to talk about his own experiences of this sort —
F: Yes, that’s right.
R: The other would be to try to think about, and present somehow, the political and social implications of this kind of view of things.
F: Actually, that looks like a difference to you, but it’s the same thing. The more he expresses who he is and what he is, the more those concerns of his come out, so it is the same thing. Neither one is the preferred option; the preferred option is both, because they are actually one. Everything that he does will be around the center of his own experience, because that’s his laboratory.
No, that’s not the right way to put it. Well, everything stems from his own center. There’s even an astrological sign of people like this, that he knows very well, and just in case anyone is interested, within one-third of his horoscope — within an exact one-third, within exactly 120 degrees — all the planets are contained. And that’s the signature of someone who has his impact from what he is, rather than necessarily what he thinks, what he does, or anything else, but it’s what he is. He absorbs and focuses the world through his own attention to himself. It’s difficult to say. It’s so simple, it’s hard.
So anyway, what we’re saying is, he will speak, he will write — to the degree that he does — about his own experiences, starting from there and going outwards. There’s no other way for him really.
R: All right, very good. Sometimes he has a sense of futility about things, and I don’t know if that sense is related to this topic we’ve been on here, or not.
F: Well he doesn’t know this, but he is about to find it out. The sense of futility that has always been there has been because a part of him has always seen the vast extent –
[pause]. Since a part of him has always been elsewhere, a part of him has always been aware of how small a thing it is to be a particular human at a particular time. And so the disproportion between what he could do, what anyone could do, and what is, often just seemed overwhelming, so that it was like, “why bother?” He doesn’t know that. He knows it now, but he didn’t know it two minutes ago.
R: All right, that’s very good. I just have one more question today, and that has to do with a thought we’ve had — I don’t know whether it was his thought first or mine — about trying to explore in more detail the lives of some of the others that he has thought of as past lives. For example, Smallwood came to mind as a possibility. Would that be a useful thing for him to do?
F: Well, even more useful will be for him to realize, as he will now, that as long as anyone attempts to obtain proof, it will be nearly impossible to pursue it, because the pursuing proof holds you in a state of mind in which you try to come up with probable results. Your own example with Mars, trying to come to probable results: As long as he does that, he’ll go up blind alleys, like. But if he will play and just be willing to make it up as he goes along — which is what he always advocates to people in terms of experiencing anything, he says, “start by pretending and when you’re not pretending you’ll know” — all he has to do is do that, and he can pursue them as far as he wants. There’s no inherent reason why he can’t find that information, because the resonance is there. And it’s useful, because any kind of extension is useful, in our opinion.
R: Yes, I don’t know that the proof factor came into it, it certainly didn’t for me —
F: It did for him.
R: Oh, it did for him? Oh, that’s interesting. It didn’t for me. I was thinking more about your sense of the helpfulness of trying to integrate these into our present thought about who we are.
F: That’s correct.
Because you see it doesn’t matter, was this a past life so-called, or was it a resonance? As far as we are concerned, it’s a thread. And if you understand the thread, you understand yourselves. And if you extend to another person, it’s like — if you have a very close relationship with a friend, does it matter that they are not a blood relative? Ultimately, if you trace your family tree back far enough, they’re going to be a blood relative, but — you see? To us, you all have an exaggerated idea of the importance of biological individuals, because we can’t find any biological individuals, they’re all one thing.
R: All right, very good. I’m going to stop asking questions then, and if there’s something that you or Frank would like to bring up, to experience there while he’s still in the booth —
F: Yes, let’s — let’s see, what’s the easiest way to do this? If you’ll go to Focus 25 with the frequencies, and then he probably won’t talk about it, but he might, it doesn’t matter — we’ll go looking for Smallwood; see if he can connect.
R: All right, Skip is taking care of moving you to Focus 25.
F: All right, and then we’ll either report or won’t, but whenever we need to, you just bring us back.
[30 seconds pause] Wow, quite a sense of compression, of my chest – like, caved in a little bit. I wonder if he was tubercular? Got a wheeze back right away. [43 seconds pause]
Tall and thin, I think. Maybe taller than Emerson. Which isn’t all that tall. Maybe a little gangly. Soft-spoken. Very polite, very cultured person, but not class-manners, just naturally. I think he came off a farm, actually, or — yeah, I think a farm. [12 second pause]
Boy, going out to Michigan just seemed like going out forever. It just seemed like so far. Great sense of bursting all bounds, out of New England. Almost like (it didn’t make physical sense, but it was almost like) going where no man had ever gone. Or no New Englander, which also didn’t make sense. Great sense of liberation from previous constraints. Not that he was a hell-raiser, he just wanted to see something new. And that life was a –
He worked — I think he did know John Muir, just that one summer. I think he didn’t go right there, either. He was in Ohio, maybe Pennsylvania. Well, let’s see.
I think he worked here and there, just either odd jobs or as the actual chore-man. We’re talking about a young man now. Which is kind of unusual, because he was a graduate — he was either a Harvard graduate or he had been to — well wait, let’s see. [pause]
Yeah, I think he was a Harvard graduate, and it was as unusual for him to do that as it was for Henry Thoreau to do the chores and stuff rather than be a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor or a clergyman. But this was freer. I think there was a little bit of guilt, for a while, about throwing away his opportunities.
Now the interesting thing is, just as I do with the Egyptian’s where my hands surround that chair, this time they’re around something entirely different. The right hand is around a square corner; it’s not a chair, but it’s a — something accustomed, anyway, whereas the left hand — well I can’t place it, the hand is sort of cupped. But the surface is flat in both cases, don’t know what is yet. Anyway, I think —
He was just picking up a lot of curious information, like the Indian names to things. And I do believe he was fascinated by Lewis and Clark, and he did follow them across — of course, this was 40 years later –
I have this sense of him on a horse by himself in the middle of nowhere. The Dakotas, maybe, or –
Might have been Nebraska, but I actually don’t think he was on the Oregon trail. I think he was avoiding it. Wanted to be by himself. But a sense of just this nature mysticism, just like in that movie that affected me, “Dances with Wolves.” He had that same sense of the holiness of the whole thing. It was fabulous.
He had something he could give the Indians as he went across. I don’t mean trinkets, there was something he could do that was of use to them. Plus they recognized in him that he wasn’t just another crazy white man.
R: I wanted to let you know that we’re out of recording tape now. So you could go ahead with this, or you could come back to it.
F: Let’s keep going for a bit, if it’s okay.
R: That’s fine.
F: One of the things he gave them, actually, was respect. He wanted to learn all their stuff, and that was important but – there was something he could do for them. [pause]
I think my left hand is around the saddle horn! But what the right hand is on, I don’t know. I want to say the stock of a rifle, but I don’t believe that’s true at all. [pause] No, actually, they may be holding reins in the buckboard? This is a later time; this is some other time. Wonder if they’re moving me along?
Well, maybe it’s time to quit. [stretches]
R: All right then, just be relaxed there for a moment, and we’ll be bringing you back with the sound.
F: Okay, you’ll notice — just as you thought — that my lungs cleared up immediately. Basically immediately. Except I think Smallwood might have had TB or something, because my chest just went inward! It was just amazing.
[yawns] I’ll make a small bet we weren’t anywhere near the null today. That is, we didn’t go across it.
R: Well, we will see.
F: Yep. Because the only time it happened, I got lost. Couldn’t remember anything. You know, like normal life. [chuckles]
[tape runs out]