Second of ten sessions in 2004
Edited transcript of a PREP session in the Bob Monroe Lab at TMI held Tuesday May 11, 2004, beginning 9: 30 a.m., Skip Atwater at the controls, Rita Warren at the microphone, Frank in the black box.
[pause]
Rita: As we move into the process this morning, move very slowly, if you can, relax, let things happen, let the connection be made. Just let be. Accept the process.
Frank: Yes, I’m willing to wait the whole time and nothing happen, if necessary.
Rita: Very good. If you feel that you want to talk during this process, that’s fine, otherwise, we’ll just be silent and let this happen.
Frank: [yawns] [long pause] Getting an image of some kind of light fixture or candelabra or something, suspended below a dome in a church. Hugely high dome; suspended a long way.
Rita: Have you seen this before?
Frank: No. Oh, this is an analogy to us, I think. That’s us. We’re like bits of light suspended from a long way up. Illuminating the space around us. [pause] That came out of nowhere, I don’t know. [pause] I had been connecting with Bertram and the Egyptian priest, and then let it go, and then this appeared.
Rita: Do you sense connection between Bertram and this light that you’re seeing?
Frank: Well, I was there in Salisbury Cathedral, remembering when I visited there, how annoyed I was at the changes they’d made. [laughs] The wooden — They cut it up somehow.
Rita: These are changes from Bertram’s time?
Frank: Yes, exactly. It was this big open space and they’ve cut it up with some kind of wooden – I don’t know even what they’re for – little boxes, it what it looked like to me. Rooms, I guess. But when I let that go, then this image appeared, and I think it’s a symbol.
Rita: We might want to talk to Bertram today so that if you can just ease yourself around the changes —
Frank: I don’t know what that means.
Rita: Don’t let the changes bother you, if you can —
Frank: Oh. Oh, about the building? No, that’s not a problem. [pause] Let’s see if you can talk to him directly. If you have something you want to talk to him about.
Rita: I’d like to know whether he can talk to us about the healing process.
Frank: [pause] Well, I think so. [pause] This is going to be a double translation, because he doesn’t speak English, really. I don’t know what he does speak; Norman French, I think. But let’s try.
Rita: All right. We would like to speak directly to Bertram if he’s agreeable to that.
Frank: Mm-hmm. I am.
Rita: Thank you, we’d like to ask some questions about a current interest of Frank’s in the healing process.
Frank: Yes.
Rita: He’s anxious to – I don’t mean “anxious” – he’s eager to move into this kind of work–
Frank: To pursue this aspect of his vocation.
Rita: Yes. [pause] Are there several of the resonances on the thread that are related to healing?
Frank: [pause]
Rita: besides yourself?
Frank: We don’t understand the question.
Rita: All right, let’s drop that question. Could you talk a little bit about how you see the process of healing the physical body?
Frank: All right. [pause] Bearing in mind that what you are talking to is not Bertram-moment-by-moment in his life, but what you call the Completed Bertram.
Rita: Yes.
Frank: So that this is why you are able to get a more – I can tell you more than he could have told you in his life. His life would have been circumscribed by beliefs and understandings that mine is not, because having the same – perhaps we should say structure of the mind, but in a wider context – my completed self is talking to Frank’s completed self which is talking to Frank which is talking to you. And my completed self – that’s a lot of translation, you know, but we’ll do what we can.
Rita: Thank you.
Frank: How Bertram experienced the process was the inflowing grace of God removing the effects of sin, or, another way of looking at it, spirit coming in and correcting all the defects of the body. You are accustomed to seeing body and spirit as though they were two different things. Perhaps we should say body and soul, given the understandings that we know that Frank has. You are making a mistake in that, because the body is the mind is the soul. They are separated to you in your experience because you experience either sensorily or mentally or through the heart – meaning, through love – or even through some ideology like religion, or science, or whatever. So to you they appear to be separate things, because they are seen through separate windows. The reality is that – and you as a psychologist know that as you change the mind, the body changes, and as you change the body the mind changes, and I will tell you that as you change the soul, either one changes, because it’s the same thing.
So that as I would have seen miracles and not ever ascribe them to myself but to God flowing through me, that was an accurate statement. You have heard that I brought someone back from the dead. I did it more than once, but I didn’t do it at all. Okay? And it is the downflow, the inflow, of grace from God into the sin-distorted body and soul that, in perfecting them, removes the obstacle to perfect health. That’s one way of seeing it.
To translate it again into your terms, it would be that your own separation from your source is the only thing that leads to physical, mental, spiritual problems, and to the degree and the extent to which you remove the separation, the obstacles, the body and soul automatically unbend, so to speak, and attain their upright structure. [pause] Does this give you what you wanted to know?
Rita: That’s very helpful. In the healing process, Frank does conceive of the energy of source flowing through him. This is consistent with what you’re saying.
Frank: Well, it should be, because he has been experiencing – his completed self through my completed self has been feeding him from the time he was first in the body the sense that this is how it is. You know? As a boy he knew that he could perform miracles if he could just figure out how to do it. So he has actually started from that knowledge, which came from Bertram’s life by way of his and my completed selves. [pause] The trick in his case was to overcome the cultural conditioning that told him it wasn’t so.
Rita: Mm-hmm. So, the process that he’s using in that regard is the most effective way for him to proceed?
Frank: [pause] Yes, but that’s not to say that he’s yet discovered the right way to do it. He’s on the right track, we’ll put it that way. The latest increment of power came when he learned to remember to call help from the other side in the form of Columba, saying that he wished Columba to come through and work through him. And in our day we would have asked for the power of the Christ to come through us, you see. But he is on uncharted ground because we had an entire articulated system behind us, and whether or not we knew the system, the system was in the air, so to speak, and you have not. That’s part of what he’s here for, is to help–among many others—to realign your understandings to that you can find the same truth that we had, but can phrase it in ways that you can understand in your vastly changed circumstances.
Rita: Yes, that’s good. Do you have some suggestions on how he can continue this process of learning to move closer to what we might think of as ideal procedures for helping with the moving-toward-health process?
Frank: Well, in our day, in our belief system, our practice was ever-increased humility and piety, ever increased purity. Now, there are different ways of attaining those, and he’ll have to find his own, but one cannot be a clear channel and at the same time an obstructed channel. Nothing obstructs the clear flow more than anything which gives one a sense of being other than a channel. So that, as an example, pride obstructs. Because price says “I myself am what is important, and everything else come second.” It doesn’t come in those terms, but that’s what it means, all right?
Some study of the seven deadly sins, and a return to the study of theology that he intended to do and forgot about — [chuckles] once he bought the books, in fact – would help him to devise means that will work for him to clear the channel. That really is ultimately all anyone needs to heal themselves or to help heal others, is to become an ever-purer channel of grace, as we would say. Of the Christ energy. Of spirit. Or however you need to say it for yourselves.
[pause] You see, it’s not a technique that’s lacking here, it’s a [pause] refining of essence. Well, it’s not only a technique that’s lacking, but the refining of essence will lead automatically to the technique, because it restores [pause] — how shall we say this? It is as though it restores memories of things he never knew. You know how he works with you, particularly, where he automatically does things, and trusts them, and they work. Well, it’s a matter of refining his essence so that he does this with others without first having to establish this basis of trust. When there’s utter trust, it’s easy. When it’s a stranger, it’s less easy, and it’s all in between those. [pause] And of course this is complicated by the fact that what seems to be a stranger may be somebody you have long-time agreements with and interactions with.
Rita: It sounds as though it would be helpful to him to try to consciously sense the issue of trust before he begins working with anyone.
Frank: Well, not exactly, because he already trusts. But it’s more a matter of him consciously becoming a better, purer, clearer channel. Difficult to say it in other terms, although if you ask the right question perhaps it will become clear.
Rita: I was getting the sense that you were saying that one of the things that interferes with getting a clear channel is the issue of trust.
Frank: Oh, I see. Yes. Okay, here’s what we meant. There is a very deep level of trust between you and him, which allows him to come from a place of being –
Okay, wait a minute. We need to put this into your terms. ][pause]
When one deals with another individual, there do or do not arise emotional obstructions, defenses, other kinds of psychological mechanisms which can get in the way of the flow, do you see? Do you remember that Jesus said, “love your enemies”? That is an example of not allowing flow to be interrupted. Not that Jesus necessarily was thinking of it in those terms, and not that I would have, but you should see that, in your – as we understand from sort of overhearing Frank’s life and talking to the completed self, we would think that would be a way that you could see it.
You in a body, in a three-dimensional psychological awareness, have a connection to the other side, as you call it, and that connection can be interfered with with all of the things we talked about earlier, envy pride gluttony sloth hatred – anger – you see? If you have someone who doesn’t raise any of those hackles, then the channel is clear because they didn’t happen to raise them. But what you need to do, if you want to do this dependably, is to be able to deal with someone who does raise those hackles, and not have the hackles raised! Do you see?
Well, you can’t depend upon someone else not raising the hackles, if you want to do this; you have to purify yourself so that in fact as you put it, there are no buttons to be pushed. [pause] Does that make sense to you?
Rita: It does. I’m asking what would be the most helpful way for Frank to think about these procedures as he goes into the healing work.
Frank: A routine, a written routine almost like a checklist that he can go through to remind himself what to do – to remind himself of the obstacles and how to remove them.
Rita: That calls for slowing down the process of moving into the healing mode, which for him seems to be very quick.
Frank: Not necessarily slowing down, but routinizing. So that, for instance, we always worked a certain way, not that we looked at it this way, but you could look at it as, when I – [pause]
All right, you may not know about Extreme Unction, although he does, but there are sacraments of the church designed for healing. Those sacraments always are performed in the identical way, in sequence. The superstitious looked at it as, “they wouldn’t work otherwise,” and they weren’t entirely wrong, but the reality behind it is, it formed a sort of framework for us that enabled us to not omit any necessary steps in our own – spiritual preparation, perhaps you could call it. All right? Not that I necessarily thought this way, but you see [pause]
[Sigh.] “Composition of place,” if you know what that means. Well, ask him, he knows. If you put yourself in a position of prayer, you will feel like praying. If you put yourself in an accustomed position of healing – that is to say, “I’ve done x, I’ve done y, I’ve done z” – then you will not omit preparations (you’d call them psychological preparations) that enable you to heal. [pause]
We’re not saying he should stand there with a piece of paper and read it though, although he could, but the actual making of the list, calling it into his mind, will when he needs to do it in a moment, make it first nature to him; second nature, you call it. Okay?
You asked specifically for a tool, and we’re saying, that’s the tool. That’s a tool, anyway. The other tool is – refinement. He needs to refine his nature. Any healer does. It’s not the place for ego, or fear, or superstition, or taking advantage or any of those things. And there are lots of others. All what we might call merely personal reactions can interfere with the clear channel of grace, and without the clear channel of grace there is no healing. Without that it’s like you’re depending on your personal worth and at least in my way of understanding, it wasn’t our personal worth. It wasn’t me, but it was Christ in me.
We know that sounds like superstition in your age. It’s just because you don’t understand the underlying reality. But yours is the age that will recover that understanding.
Rita: And Frank has all of the information eh needs to do these processes?
Frank: Well, he was raised in the pre-Vatican II Catholic church, and not by accident. That childlike understanding – or rather, his grownup remembrance (an emotional remembrance, not a mental remembrance) of that understanding helps him to connect to me among others, who has everything he needs. Okay? He’s a bridge–you’re all bridges; everyone is a bridge; I was a bridge—between the age that’s past and the age that’s coming. So part of your work is to be a bridge between what was and what is and what will be. You are a continuity.
Rita: And thinking about the process of refinement, is there something specific that he ought to focus on?
Frank: [pause] This won’t seem like much to you, perhaps. He needs – and he knows this; this last dozen years has been the process of beginning this. He needs to overcome the residual illusion that he is separate. So do you all, for that matter, but that’s the –
We expect you are thinking, you know, one sin or one kind of sin, or one character flaw or whatever, and there’s something to that, but the basic problem is the illusion that you are separate. Because that illusion in a way is reality as long as it’s an effective illusion. Overcome the illusion and you then know. Once knowing, then the flow is not inhibited.
Rita: And you’re speaking here about separation from God, or separation from your fellow man?
Frank: [laughs] Well, you are demonstrating the problem, you know. Separation from anything. You are not separate. You are all – we are all – one thing. There’s no other way that it can be. All of your sensory and much of your educational experience persuades you of separations, and the – um – the opportunity is to overcome the persuasion of separateness and also come to a persuasion of oneness. You know, we’ve talked about this for a long time.
Well, that’s interesting, did you hear that? We swapped from Bertram over to the guys?
Rita: Mm-hmm.
Frank: Anyway, talking about see it as one or see it as much. Let’s see if Bertram’s still here. That was funny. [pause] All right, go ahead. [pause] I feel very close to Bertram. [pause]
Go ahead, Rita, I think he’s close enough.
Rita: Moving from all of our past training which encourages our separateness to remembering the oneness, is a challenge for us. That’s clear. But it does seem particularly important in healing that Frank would be clearer about his lack of separation from the person that he’s working with.
Frank: Well, you see, you are working without the structure that we had to assist us, because true religion is nothing but a continuous reminder that the senses are illusory in telling us that we are separate, you see. So we lived out lives in bodies that told us we were separate, but we lived in a religious setting that told us we were not, so it enabled us to have a foot in both worlds. Which is what you need, and without the external church setting, which I agree cannot and should not be reconstructed. In other words, you can’t go back to where we were; now you need to go forward to what is being constructed. And you’re not, of course, any of you alone in this. (Obviously, in the context of nothing separate — but you know what I mean.)
You need – and Frank as a small example needs – what we had in the church; a social and also an individual reinforcement of the view of the knowing that you’re not alone, which you will remember was a culminating point in his Gateway experiences, but beyond not being alone, that “alone” is meaningless; that there’s only everything, there isn’t some things and not other things.
We cannot undertake to give you that new structure. That’s part of what you’re there doing, is building it. Or rather than building it, should say more like, discovering it. How’s that?
Rita: Is it possible in our world to operate in this state of oneness without becoming paralyzed with respect to the activities of this world?
Frank: Sure. In fact, far from becoming paralyzed, you become aware. Your awareness is wider, your abilities are wider. This is what – if you want an example of what it’s like, examine your lives of your saints. This is another thing that came to him last year when he was in Iona, that those lives of the saints had been privatized by the church and need to be put out again, because they were real happenings and they are real examples for you, the difficulty being that you have to separate the example of the life from the framework we built around those lives.
So if you see someone like Columba who could see things at a distance, who knew things that would happen before they did, who had in short what you would call extrasensory powers, that is a small example of how you become, the more you experience oneness at a deep level. Not just a conscious concept of it, but a living in oneness.
You have many people around you where you are, not coincidentally, who are already sort of breaking through here and there, including yourselves, and therefore they are sort of poking holes in the old structures that they thought were real, and beyond the hole they can see more, and so sometimes they break more holes and it becomes even larger. But in the absence of form and in the absence of structure, there is all exploration but no systematization. Not saying that’s good or bad, but it just makes your lives more tentative. On the other hand it gives you more freedom, everything’s a tradeoff, of course. [pause] Did we lose you on that?
Rita: No. I wanted to ask particularly about calling on Columba. Is that a particularly helpful saint for Frank to work with?
Frank: Well, it’s a major thread. He and I and Columba and Joseph in Egypt and others. Someone had suggested to him that he may have been Columba, and in a sense that’s true. Not in the literal sense that you all think of reincarnation as one bundle and then the same bundle. But certainly it is a major thread. It is – how shall we say this? – It is a connection more available to him than Genghis Kahn, say. We don’t mean to be absurd, but – do you see? It’s closer; it’s a closer resonance, it has more in common; there are more – um – there’s more of an emotional closeness between what I am, and what Columba is, what Frank is, than there is between any of us and, say, a soldier or a merchant or a housewife, while following this thread. And the point about being an individual is, there are all these different threads, and whichever thread you follow leads you to a whole ’nother set of connections.
Columba is a major – and as am I – is a major available resource that we share. We know this makes no sense to you, but I can help Columba. Time doesn’t work one way.
Rita: Mm-hmm. This language makes sense in terms of our past experience of talking to the gentlemen upstairs. So the language is not strange, although of course it’s not completely understandable to us, either.
Frank: I might as well point out to you, if you haven’t figured this out – no reason why you should or shouldn’t – but I am one of what you call the Gentlemen Upstairs. I am among those what frequently come in. We have made efforts not to differentiate, because we didn’t want to overemphasize the individuality aspect, as opposed to the oneness aspect. You sort of caught us in the act, a while ago there [chuckles]
Rita: Yes. That’s helpful for you to point that out. Is there a category, so to speak, of these particular individual entities, that seem to be represented along this thread or this set of threads? Are we talking about, for example, a category like saints?
Frank: Well, I do understand the question and I can answer it, but as always the misleading nuances are stopping me, so let’s just clear a little ground here. There is a difference between an internal thread that is shared among people, on the one hand, and any obvious link in their lives on the other hand. One might be seen as a saint, another might just be seen as a nondescript farmer and a third as merchant or whatever, but they could still share that inner thread of healing.
Many a grandmother is a healing presence. Not seen that way but experienced that way by certain individuals, namely the family. You see. So the answer to your question is yes, there is a very strong thread, but that thread is not necessarily one that would look obvious even if we gave you a list of the names of the 17 people on the thread, or 37, or 314, you understand.
Your question implies – well, we think your question meant, if one went back, could one say Frank is connected to a long line of saints or healers? And one answer would be yes, but another answer would be, so are you; so is everyone. The question is, which thread do you choose to take up?
We remind you, there’s still only one of all of us. We’re all one interconnected, inseparable being, it’s just that some aspects are closer to the parts of yourselves that are closest to your consciousness, than others. [pause] This by the way – Anyone in a religious life knows that pursuing the religious life becomes a struggle as one fights one’s lower nature and aspires to one’s higher nature. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of saying that would be, the various threads that comprise you as an individual aren’t necessarily congruent. There’s many a person fighting civil wars inside themselves.
Were you to follow all of your threads – this will answer your earlier question somewhat, too — were you to follow all of your threads at the same time, were you to become simultaneously aware of them, you would find yourself in the middle of this vast congeries of somewhat antagonistic and somewhat complementary and somewhat cooperative individuals, so-called. Do you see where we’re going with this? You have within yourselves all possible contradictions. Some people are bundles that have more of one kind of thing than another, and your convenient shorthand says, “that’s a very warlike person,” or a very saint-like person, or a very rational person, or a very emotional person. (We realize that those categories don’t seem to be congruent, but forget about that.) The point is, you are compromises that you make in order to make sense of something far too complicated to be made sense of without the generalizations.
Rita: I think I followed that. [pause] Are there some other things in this general area that would be helpful to Frank to know about? The focus that I’m getting out of this is that Frank is moving from one set of factors being major in his life – his publishing life, his writing, and so on – to another phase which is more centered around issues like healing. If this is so, can you give us some help on how to think about that?
Frank: Well, there is a tendency to overemphasize change over continuity, in him, so now that he has seen the change, we’re going to emphasize the continuity. Just because he’s moving to another phase of his life, doesn’t mean it’s as if the other phase didn’t exist, and it doesn’t mean that he’ll never write another book, and it doesn’t mean that writing won’t be an intrinsic part in his dissemination of what he’s learning.
But, that caveat aside, in the last dozen years or so, he’s learned to work with people, and that has been a major change for him. There is still internal work to be done that is very important. No one can do it for him but him, you know; everyone has to do it. We know what you’re sort of wishing for, but it cannot be given. The next steps need to emerge from choice and naturally, rather than from advance recognition. Sometimes advance recognition helps, but not in this case. In this case he needs to feel his way toward what will happen. It’ll be all right.
Rita: This is a question that possibly doesn’t help him, but I’d like to ask about his thinking that these phases have something to do with the astrological movement in his chart. Does that make sense to you?
Frank: Oh, absolutely. You will remember that Edgar Cayce said it would profit anyone to study astrology. That’s your cosmic weather report. It doesn’t tell what you’ll do, but it tells what you’ll be inclined to do. Impelled, is not a bad word. You’ll tend to feel this way, you’ll tend to react this way, you’ll tend to gravitate toward this. Okay? There’s nothing deterministic about it, and it is a good—
Your mental world, the 21st century, has so few supportive constructs; you don’t have the church, you don’t have a worldview that any construct that is somewhat compatible with your existing decaying world view is a helpful tool. Astrology is scientific enough, is mechanistic enough, that it will actually help people to move on. There will be a time when you don’t need it, but it’s helpful now. It is an accurate predictor of your inner weather, let’s put it that way, and, as such, serves as a reminder that in fact everything is all connected. That’s an important —
[Change sides of tape]
This is why divination works – you’ve heard him say this more than once, and it’s absolutely true – this is why divination works, because everything is one. Make up a new rule and it will automatically work.
Rita: I’m not sure I’m understanding, here.
Frank: Astrology is as good a way to understand your life as any other way, is what we’re saying.
Rita: It’s attempting to try to ask which comes first, and I guess if all is one, we don’t have to worry about that, but the astrological phenomena is something that we think can be measured out there —
Frank: That’s right.
Rita: — at least, the movement of the planets. And he seems to be moving into a new phase with respect to the sun —
Frank: Okay, we can give you a way of thinking about it. We see your perplexity here.
Taking the movement of the stars and the planets and all as objective phenomena that are going to happen on a scheduled basis, they are the only form of divination that pins your down to time. Dreams, precognition, telepathy – anything else – has no necessary time. Psychics are notoriously bad on pinpointing time. Astrology, on the other hand, is notoriously perfect at pinpointing time. Relatively perfect. And it is ambiguous in terms of what does it mean.
So astrology will tell you exactly that this will happen then, and something meaningful with these characteristics will be your underlying background weather at that particular moment. What it doesn’t say is what you will be, because an advanced soul, born in the same moment in the same time, if it were possible for two people to be born at the same time and in exactly the same place — and for practical purposes it is possible – their lives will have many similarities, but by the nature of the soul that came in at that time and place, some will react one way and others will react another way, but the weather underneath will be identical.
So, if an inauspicious moment one may kill someone else out of a moment of anger, another one might say “boy that really annoys me” and go on to other things. It’s the same weather, the same solar weather. There is no determinance in your life in terms of what you will do. There is entire determinance in your life in terms of where you come from. So that all of your free will is in the moment.
You can do whatever is possible in any give moment. But you are in one situation. It’s absolutely determined, in any given moment, the moment from which you operate your free will, because that’s where you came to. You are here, you’re not in China. You were born in 1910, you were not born in 1912. You were born an Englishman, you were not born an Indian woman. Okay? All of those things are the determinants. But whenever you find yourself in any given moment, that moment has the free will to say “I’m annoyed but I’m not going to give in to it,” or to not even be annoyed, or to give in to it in a big way or to have a major temper tantrum. Just as an example, but that’s where we are/
Your lives had patterns. You came into the world in a certain time, in a certain place, because that was the ongoing pattern, that was the ongoing weather, that offered you the best chance of accomplishing what it was you were attempting to accomplish, in this given lifetime. None of it is chance.
Rita: Well Frank is seeming to use the change in his chart to at least be consistent with his interest in moving from one kind of focus in his life, his career, to another focus. Is that simply a state of being that may be an appropriate thing because this will work better now than it would be if he reversed the career choices for those periods of time?
Frank: Well, sort of. You know how he is, he feels his way toward things, rather than thinks his way to them? And so it isn’t that he’s averse to using logic, but his basic bent is to feel his way toward what he does next. And so to see something external like an astrological aspect coming up gives him a clue, and he says, “well, okay, my progressed sun is moving into Libra, that’s not as much writing. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel as much like writing.” I don’t think it would be accurate to say that he looks at it like “this is determined, I cannot do this now,” but it’s more like, “this is the way the current is probably moving now, how do I feel about that?”
Rita: Very good, that’s helpful. Is there anything else on this topic that would be useful for us to talk about?
Frank: Well, just bear in mind your own crucial contribution to his ability to feel his way toward what he’s going to become. Because, without a person to work with who doesn’t push all those button, he would have a harder time experiencing what it’s like to do this without pushing all those buttons, you see? That’s tautological, but in other words, we’re saying you have a crucial piece of this, and of course you came into this world and that wasn’t an accident. In other words, that’s part of your agenda as well, obviously. Perhaps not obviously, though, so we mention it.
You wee wondering why you were hanging around, you remember.
Rita: That’s true. I’m wanting to make sure we don’t miss anything here by moving on to something else, but there’s another kind of question I wanted to ask if it’s appropriate now.
Frank: Go ahead.
Rita: We’ve been reading and hearing some material that talk about the soul and the spirit, and some distinctions and some of the phenomena that occur at the death process – the death of the physical body. The gentlemen have in the past – including you —
Frank: [chuckles]
Rita: have talked about the process of crystallization, and the difference between what happens at physical death if the crystallization process has occurred. I’m wondering if that’s the same thing that we’re hearing about now from other authors and speakers.
Frank: Well, you see how much confusion is caused because people try to describe similar things in totally different terms of reference – not that there’s anything to be done about it, but that’s an equivalent of your Tower of Babel.
We would say, in my day, if a person dies and is not in a state of grace, they must go to purgatory to be refined, or to hell because they have chosen by their lives not to be a part of God. Now, because I am part of this, rather that only part of that life, I understand how that looks to you. But your modern understandings are not so far from that, it’s just the context is entirely seemingly different.
If you life your life with integrity and you build yourself a crystal – that is to say, you don’t –
A moment, here.
[pause]
It’s unfortunate that we use the words threads, because they make a physical analogy more difficult, but leaving aside the physical impossibility, the analogy is you as one person in one body and one psyche, are still nonetheless a collection of threads that go off in all directions. If you in your lifetime create a unity of those threads, [sigh] [pause]
This is why you always got the answer, “it’s too hard to explain.”
On the one hand, you are a seeming unity that is in fact connected to all of life through these threads. On the other hand, your coherence can become a lens through which we can see, just as the completed Bertram you see is a lens through which you can see. The completion of it gives you the opportunity to talk to him through me, in a way. But if Bertram’s life was chaos, if there was no advantage to holding that lens,–
No, that’s not exactly right. If the lens had no internal cohesion, —
[pause] It’s really nearly impossible to describe this. We’re putting everything into three-dimensional terms, and all of that of course implies past and forward …. Hold on a minute. [pause]
No, let’s go back. We’ll try it again from the point of view you were describing. That point of view says that as spirit descends into the body, it creates a soul as part of the body, and then what? [pause] What follows from that?
Rita: Well, one perspective is that the spirit then which never leaves God creates a soul that stays with the body, develops in this life, and my question had to do with what we were earlier given to call crystallization process, that if one dies in a crystallization process – and my question is, is the crystallization a joining of the soul and the spirit, so that if that has occurred by the time of physical death, a different process can occur than if those are separated?
Frank: We attempted to go to our old way of explaining to you, and tried to connect this with it; it’s difficult. Let’s say, they’re seeing the same process. They’re not wrong. But [pause]
Let’s compromise in our description. Perhaps a way of saying this would be that any life that’s lived creates a lens, but many of those lenses don’t particularly show anything. They’re not well hones, they don’t magnify, they’re not clear, they’re cloudy for whatever reason – and so no one ever bothers to look through them. Is that perhaps a better way of showing you–?
It isn’t that they don’t exist, exactly, because anything that existed, exists. But at the same time they’re not active. [pause] Now, don’t think we don’t hear all those contradictions, but I don’t know how we’re going to resolve them.
Rita: Well, the further part of that question had to do with, that process having occurred by the point of physical death, or not, and the implications for that.
Frank: Well, the implications are merely this. The only thing holding that bundle together is a physical body and a psyche, so that when the physical body dissolves, if there’s nothing to hold the threads together, they don’t hold together, they just –
But then you see in your mind you get the physical impression of strands that are hanging in space. [laughs] We were aware of that, but don’t know what to do about it. It’s that you –
Okay, look at it as a window of opportunity. You’re born, you die. In between those times, you can make of it what you can make of it. If you haven’t done if by the time you die, you can’t once the body is dead, because there’s no – there’s nothing to work with.
However, that all implies from past to present to future. When you look at it from outside, it’s totally different, and we despair of making it any way clear, because all of those moments exist. [pause]
Well, it’s not such a bad analogy to say that some are good lenses and some are bad lenses, and it’s just we only bother with the ones we can see something through. Don’t know a better way to do that yet. Maybe if you ask the wrong question the right answer will pop up. [They laugh]
Rita: Well, I appreciate the attempt there.
Frank: You understand all the difficulties here: To put something that is not in time-space into a time-space analogy is bad enough, but then to do all of that and to talk about moment-by-moment when in fact it isn’t moment-by-moment but it is like a long smear in the way that we’ve described you as you look to us sort of like worms –. It’s too much translation. Worms in the sense of this long, long being, each of which has a time-slice section, you know. You remember that from a long time ago.
Rita: I do remember. It’s making me smile.
Frank: Now, we’ll give you another step here, since you’re ready for it. It should be obvious to you now that the guys upstairs – not only me, but our friend Joseph the Egyptian monk, and Smallwood and the others – every one of your threads that you’re closest too are potentially one of your guys upstairs at any given moment. That should perhaps make a more coherent picture for you. But we really stress, it is a mistake to think of it as –
There’s nothing wrong with thinking of it as a council of people, provided that you remember that it’s also not true. Provided you remember that also all is one unity, not a series of individuals. If you can bear that in mind, there’s nothing wrong with the thought of The Guys Upstairs being individuals coming in from their own crystal, from their own experience in their own lifetimes.
See, there’s – maybe this will help you a little indirectly. Bertram was born, lived, and died. The completed Bertram is available and worthwhile for you to talk to. Someone who was born, lived and died and didn’t do anything except just survive might in some particular instance have something worthwhile for you to talk to, but the possibilities are much less. And if you are interested in military technique, talking to Bertram would be pretty useless. He had military experience, but not as a military man. He was – Do you see what we’re saying? He was in the crusade, but he wasn’t a fighter, so you wouldn’t go to him for military experience, although I suppose you could go to him for “what’s it like to be a non-combatant participant in a war.
Do you see what we’re saying? It depends on what you want, who’s the most likely helpful person to go to.
Rita: For example if we wanted to ask questions about the abuse of prisoners in the current war, would we talk to Bertram?
Frank: It would depend on what aspect of the situation you wanted to go into. Is it, “what would lead soldiers to do that,” or is it, “what’s the psychological pressures on people,” is it the experience of evil within us? You know, it would depend.
Rita: All right, let’s ask a question. How do we think of some phenomena like this in our experience of this world? Or maybe that is the question of the presence of evil, or is there a better interpretation?
Frank: You want to know how you do think, or how you should think, or how we think you should think?
Rita: [chuckles] I’m asking the question, how can we possibly make sense of this experience in the world?
Frank: Ah! Okay. Well, it’s very simple. Think of yourselves as bundles of threads, and those threads connect to everything. Well, there are people who are predominantly of a nature that does what you consider to be evil, and people who follow those threads do evil things. And that’s a very good analogy for a couple of reasons, because it isn’t like there are people in the world who are good and people who are evil. We are all good and evil. We all have all threads. All possibilities are within us. But it becomes a question of which thread do we follow. Which threads to we encourage? You become like–. “As a man thinketh in his soul, so is he.” Okay?
Now, there are several factors here. One, some people become jailers because they want arbitrary power over others. Others become jailers because of what seems to them external circumstance. No one can predict in advance what their reaction to extreme circumstances would be. No one. You think you can, but you can’t. Ask anyone who’s been in a war as a fighter, or even as a close observer, and they will tell you, you do not yet know what you are capable of doing, because not only can the chaos of it affect you, but the traumatic aftermath can affect you.
It is a common mistake to say, “those people were evil.” It is much closer to the truth to say, “those people did evil.” And there is a huge difference between those two statements.
So, we would say how you should think of this is, these people were put in positions that either were beyond their ability to react positively, or were enough that they chose not to. You know. Some people do choose evil. Some people do evil without exactly choosing it. Some people see themselves as helpless and wind up doing evil even not wanting to. There’s a huge spread between possibilities that result in the same action. We remind you, “judge not, lest you be judged.” It’s important. “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
You see, all of these things that we had in our time to give us a coherent code, you do not have, and it makes your lives harder. But that’s all right, because you are in the in-between spot where you’re creating a new way of being. And you’re not here by accident, you wanted to be here; you came here for this moment. So don’t despair and don’t be hopeless about it, just recognize, all of you are intrinsically connected to evil. All of you are intrinsically connected to good. It becomes a complicated matter of which threads will you follow, which circumstances will you put yourself in that will make one or another more likely to be followed, and it all stems from there.
The more internally based one is, the more resistance one has to doing evil. It’s really quite that simple. And nothing in your society is leading people toward being internally directed. So who is the sinner here? And who is – as you like to call them (not you yourselves) – victims?
Rita: Sometimes as you talk I get the sense that you believe evil exists. Other times I’m hearing you say, “well, maybe evil doesn’t exist, misbehavior exists.
Frank: Well, it’s just a matter of polarities. But you’re living in polarity. While you are living in polarity, you know things that are good for you and evil for you. You would not have any hesitation in seeing that torturing a person is evil, although there are circumstances in which you might say it’s a necessary evil. And there might even be extreme circumstances in which you the equivalent of “he had it coming” or “this is necessary.” Or more than necessary, “this is good.”
The ambivalence is, you don’t all have the identical scale of good and evil. And that’s where moral relativism comes in. But the absolute is that you are in a world of polarities, and you cannot help have good and evil. You will remember that Jesus said, “because you are lukewarm, I’ll spit you out of my mouth.” He didn’t mean that it’s better to be evil than to be lukewarm, but you have to live the polarities in order to — live. Okay?
The only way to avoid polarities in your life is not to live. So this means you must choose. And you’ve got it in your Bhagavad-Gita, where he says, “I don’t have anything against those people,” and he said “this is your role; you have to play the role. Go fight even though you don’t believe in it.” Now, that should be both confusing and helpful, because it’s an entirely different belief system. Nonetheless, the underlying commonality is, you are living in a world of polarity, and you have no way not to live in a world of polarity – except insofar as you can remember that all is one. So that’s why it seems inconsistent to you.
That’s our cover story, anyway.
Rita: So those who are saying it’s possible to live in a non-dualistic state while operating out of a physical body are wrong?
Frank: Well, let them demonstrate it! Let them be both male and female at the same time, and then we’ll come back and we’ll reconsider. How can you live without polarities? Night and day, hot and cold, in and out, up and down. Life in a body is intrinsically polarity. There’s no way out that we know of. But it’s not only polarity; that’s our point.
[pause]
You will remember the tree of good and evil, and Frank’s understanding one day – with a little help from his friends — that it should be called the Tree of the Perception of Good and Evil? Meaning, the tree of perceiving things as good and bad; but regardless whether you perceive them as good and bad, they are. They just are. You are in polarity.
Rita: Okay, a suggestion here from Skip to look at the various wars that we’ve fought from the Civil War on, through World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam, and now our trying to deal with terror networks. We know that during all of these past wars, we have information about the outcome, so to speak. Can you say something about the outcome of our present struggle?
Frank: Hmm. Well, the first thing we can say absolutely is, remember, you become like the worst in those you fight. It’s important to choose who you’re going to fight, for that reason.
So that, one outcome of this war is going to be an increased fanaticism in the United States, a decreased trust, an increased fear and therefore hatred of differences, a more schismatic way of looking at things, so that rather than fellow citizens they become potential enemies…. All you need to do is look at your enemies as you perceive them, and it will tell you how you are going to be affected.
If you mean, more superficially, will you win the war or not, we’ll say to you, you answer that first question and decide for yourself it that’s winning. There is no physical possibility that terrorists will overcome and take over your country, in terms of running things, in terms of walking in and setting up a government. There is a very real possibility, a probability, that they are winning in terms of your becoming what you would not have become otherwise.
Now, when you ask about the war on terror, you must ask yourself do I mean wars fought overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya and anywhere else, or do I mean protection of the American continent from terroristic incidents, or do I mean the protection of the American political, economic network that suffuses the world, or do I meant he isolation or integration of America with its traditional allies or with international orders, — all of those are very different questions, most of them not being considered very actively. We would say to you, the active consideration of those questions will tell you more about the course and effects of the war than any question of whether or not America could ostensibly lose the war.
American cannot lose the war in conventional terms any more than it could lose the war in Iraq, but it can wind up in a situation which it is unable to resolve, and in that sense, does lose.
Vietnam. The Vietnamese government did not come over and take over America, but it did defeat America’s attempt to impose a western structure upon an eastern culture. That is not what America thought it was doing, but that’s how the Vietnamese perceived it. At the same time, the Vietnamese experience coarsened America to the extent that it fought, and brought in extensive drug use, conspiratorial sub-wars, shall we say, extra-legal and illegal activities at all levels of government, seemingly as a necessity of the war, etc., etc.
World War II brought forth a transformation within six years of America into a country that could drop Atomic bombs on Japan, but could also with malice aforethought turn Dresden into a firebomb that killed 300,000 people. America could not have done that in 1938. It was well capable of doing it by 1945.
In 1916, before it entered the war, America was incapable of meddling with Europe’s finances, with Europe’s balance of power and all that. By the end of 1918 when the war ended, it became incapable of not doing it, regardless what it wanted. And you could continue going back.
In 1860, America was a country split in two in terms of two civilizations, but by 1865, neither of those civilizations survived. The nation of small villages had become nascently the nation of large super-corporations like steel, particularly steel, which systematically then corrupted the legislatures, whereas the south had lost its entire source of human capital and had extensive destruction as well.
But all of those – that’s of some historical interest, but the main point is this: You become like the worst in those you fight. “Resist not evil,” Jesus said, and he said it for a reason. [pause] Did that answer the question at all?
Rita: Unfortunately.
Frank: We don’t mean to paint a bleak picture, either. These are experiences, and you’re here to experience. You can always learn from what you’ve done. Or what has happened to you, whichever way you wish to see it.
All is still well.
Rita: We’ve talked before about the difficult times ahead, and that we are already in the midst of them, as we talk about them.
Frank: Mm-hmm.
Rita: And I guess the question is, are we at a level where this will continue as it’s been going, or there some shaking up to be done in a stronger way?
Frank: You mean have you reached a plateau of stability?
Rita: Not stability, no, but to the extent that we have been going through this process for some time, and will continue to do that, is this the level at which we will continue to experience these changes?
Frank: Oh, not nearly.
Rita: I see.
Frank: Now, we want to put this in a positive way, because it is as positive as it is negative, and it’s a mistake to look at things negatively. You really want to remember at least in one part of yourselves that all is well. It really is true.
What happens is, that as you learn to adjust to a new level of intensity, the intensity then gets ratcheted up, and you learn to adjust to a new level of intensity. After this happens ten times, you’re not the same person you were at the beginning. In fact, it’s a good analogy to what happens to a country in war. You’re not the same person, but you’re able to do so much more and bear so much more and have more effect. It’s ratcheted up be degrees because you need to get used to it and then go on. You can’t go from step one to step ten. You have to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
You are still mostly in what you used to know as normality. You haven’t yet gotten to – you’re maybe in the second inning of the ball game, which could go into extra innings, we point out. You’re only just beginning – but this is not a reason or an excuse for panic or even for depression. You are transforming not only your entire civilization, you are transforming what it is to be human. On the other end of this, we have reminded you in the past, is a human race which is immediately and firmly, beyond any doubt, aware of its connection to the other side. A human race that lives that way is not the same human race you were, before all this began, which is a good while now.
Now, you’re in the biggest, most intense portion of the changes, so far. But we remind you and all those who listen to this, you are here because you came to be here and contribute to the playing of the inning. Nobody’s here as an innocent victim. And nobody’s here as a helpless victim. You’re here and you can contribute, and that’s what you came to do. It isn’t the only thing you came to do, but you did come here, in this time, in this place, because this is where you could work out your salvation of your soul, is the way that Bertram would put it.
Rita: Well, thank you for that explanation. We’re going to have to move on, but I’m reassured by being able to talk to the completed Bertram that we may do this again.
Frank: Any time you want you can do this. You can do this at home, too.
Rita: It’s been a real pleasure to speak with you. And I’d like Frank now to being the process of moving back from the higher focus levels —
Frank: You want me to start slumming, is this it?
Rita: [laughs] move on down to the focus 10 area and we’ll help you at that point count down.
Frank: Well, you know, all I really need to do I’ve done; it’s just a matter of moving a couple of muscles, and – I’m right here.
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