Edited transcript of a PREP session in the Bob Monroe Lab at TMI held Tuesday morning, June 1, 2004, Skip Atwater at the controls, Rita Warren at the microphone, Frank in the black box.
A highly unusual session! I was very tired afterward, and spent much of the afternoon napping. This one was hard work, as you shall see.
[begin transcript]
Frank: For the first time ever, I feel the approving presence of Bob Monroe. Never felt his presence in the past ten years, or whatever.
Rita: Is there some more that you would like to say about that?
Frank: Well, I started by expanding my rebal [Resonant Energy BALloon, a Monroe concept] to the extent of the black box, and then to the room and then to where you and Skip are, in other words, expanding out among the whole building, and then I wound up expanding backwards to when he was building the place. [pause] I had just a sense of him smiling, you know. Like, “this is what I was doing. Keep doing it.” [yawns] No words or anything.
Rita: Is this important to you, the approval?
Frank: I never think about it one way or the other, it just happened. It feels nice that I’ve got it, of course. [pause] And we can always go into “am I making this up” [laughs] but I really don’t think so, because it was out of left field. [yawns]
Rita: Have you any interest in asking Bob questions?
Frank: Well, I’ll follow wherever you want to go. If you have something to ask him, go ahead. [pause] My method of operation here is really sort of an active receptivity, so it’s easier if somebody else is providing direction.
Rita: All right, I understand that. If you do have still the presence of the Bob energy, ask if he regularly keeps in touch with this kind of work in the lab, and how he sees it.
Frank: Yes, it was an immediate yes – because, it’s the ultimate multi-tasking, you know. It’s not like, by being here he can’t be somewhere else, and this is one of the many threads that he holds in his hand. I suppose we can’t use the word “threads” now, but you know what I mean. He is doing many things. The analogy is to [TGU’s statement} that anybody who reads the book is connected to the writer of the book and all the other readers of the book.” Bob is the writer of the book of the Institute, so to speak. So everybody coming here connects in with him. [pause] What was the other part of the question?
Rita: How he feels about this part of the work that’s going on at the institute.
Frank: Let’s see if he’ll come through. I’ve never had that happen. [pause] No, I just get a sense of active benign interest.
Rita: All right. Ask if he could use the thread analogy and if so, is this part of the institute’s program one of the threads that he’s following.
Frank: All parts. He’s connected to every participant, in every program. And in fact, connected to those who come to Gateway, and that’s why they come to Gateway, in a sense. They come into this world with a thread that leads through here.
Rita: And is his interest primarily the individuals who come, rather than the program components?
Frank: Kind of big smile on that. “What individuals?” [laughs] In other words —
Rita: Gotcha.
Frank: Okay. He’s seeing it that same way. But it’s more like — hmm, that’s interesting. From his point of view, it’s more like you’re painting with color than accumulating individuals. Each one of them could be another color into the palette. Terrible way of saying it. [pause]
If each of us who think of ourselves as individuals thought of ourselves as a whole collection of different colored threads, all of those different colored threads coming together in one space and time make a sort of a visual picture. So if everybody has 100 threads, and there’s 20 people, suddenly you have 2,000 different colored threads, and of course the threads are dancing, and things are mingling and all, so it’s like a light show, in a way. It can be seen that way.
[pause] What we’re trying to say is that the energies are more apparent from this side than the individuals connecting the energies. You can look at either one; you can find the individual and concentrate on it, or you can follow the energies and the threads, and you’re looking at the same picture two entirely different ways, and so you get two different results. And if you look at them both in the same no-time, then you get stereo.
Rita: I think I’ve been said no to three times now, but I’ll try one more time.
Frank: [laughs]
Rita: His focus is not, then, particular elements of the programs at the institute, for example the teaching sessions, the lab programs, and so on. It’s not that he’s thinking, “I wish that they would develop certain aspects of this in a different way,” or something like that. His focus seems to be on the threads representing individuals coming through.
Frank: Well, yes, we see the question. It’s more like, there are several different ways to skin cats, and what is clearer from this side is the opening and the transformation of the individuals so that they can more easily do what they came into the world to do. It’s like a waking up. And one can wake up with one kind of program or another kind of program, or both together, or neither. It isn’t exactly like there’s a kind of program necessary that’s not there, or that there’s a program that’s harmful, because, you know, we’re always making do, and whatever’s there can be used.
To speak specifically of Bob is a little misleading because, again, you’re putting the individual over here in a way that we aren’t. It would be like [pause]
Hard to find an analogy on your side. It would be like treating 20 of your threads as if they were inherently separate from the other 80 threads that are in your spool. You could look at it that way, but it’s more misleading than forward-looking. Bob was not an individual on your side; how’s he going to be an individual on our side? Perhaps that can sort of lead you to it sideways.
It isn’t that “he’s not,” but it isn’t that “he’s only.” It’s that he is inherently –
Our connections over here are stronger than our separations other than by vibration. And so –
No, we’re going to bail out of that whole explanation. We’ll go again.
The part that is Bob looks at the part that is the Institute’s people coming through and sees their transformations, and gives people ideas as to little things that can change, but doesn’t even see the details of the programs nearly as much as you might think. It’s more seeing the dynamic movement of the people involved in it. Now, you might think, “Bob always kept his fingers on all the details, as best he could,” but from this side, they’re different details that we’re looking at. That’s the best– [pause] You won’t irritate us by asking again. Ask in different ways, maybe you’ll get a different answer, but that’s the best we can do from this point of view.
Rita: Well, let me ask just one more thing. To the extent that we’re speaking to him as an individual, we’re talking to the completed Bob?
Frank: Sure.
Rita: That’s true.
Frank: Well, there’s no other way. We thought we went through that. It looks to you like you talk to the individual in process, but always it’s your completed individual talking to the other completed individual.
Rita: All right, thank you very much for that.
Frank: Mm-hmm. [pause] Nice painting, by the way. [This refers to the painting Frank did in response to TGU’s suggestion in the previous session that he paint an image representing their description of individuals as hollow spools bundling threads which extend between spools and connected them in various ways.]
Rita: That was where I wanted to go next.
Frank: [laughs]
Rita: Let’s talk about the painting. To what extent does it reflect the picture that the guys were trying to present, or were presenting?
Frank: Well actually, it represents this process, we think, very well, in that it is a simplified and a little bit distorted version of what we’re trying to get across. By necessity. And we would say that’s an excellent metaphor for the whole process of trying to talk from one side to the other.
As you noticed, you couldn’t put 100 threads in one spool and have it look like anything. But two or three were enough to give you the idea. That’s the same thing we’re doing allllll [emphasized] the time! [pause] You’ve heard us a couple times apologize that what we’re giving you is more distortion than picture, but we’re still doing our best.
Which is not bad, we would point out. [chuckles]
Rita: We need a language that we’re a little more sure of here, or at least that would be helpful. My memory from last session is that you were talking about individuals – if we can represent them here – moving along a thread. Is that an appropriate way to talk about it?
Frank: Moving their consciousness along a thread.
Rita: Yes.
Frank: That’s right.
Rita: So that the threads aren’t inevitably in the certain spools, but come through those spools at the point where the individual is moving along the —
Frank: Well, no, we wouldn’t exactly say that. We’d say the threads are. They exist. In certain places, they are bundled together in space-time to form what looks to you an individual, and that bundling in space-time is what creates that individual. In other words, that’s what creates the node of those hundred threads. You see? The threads were, beforehand. But you as an individual are a temporary gathering of them into something that becomes the what-happens-when-you-bundle-those-threads. Then, when you drop the body and go on, the, shall we say, “cosmic memory of that bundle” remains.
That’s one of the functions of space-time: It creates. Can you see where we’re going with this? Think of non-space-time as entirely filled with threads. And think of you being born into space-time as being a gathering of certain threads, which will then remain gathered forever.
And of course the whole space-time problem is inherent in that thing about “forever” meaning, “well weren’t they already,” but we can’t do everything at the same time. We’ll have to leave that aside.
Working from the framework of time as if time moved from past to present to future, for the moment (but bearing in mind that it’s not really true), what happens is, all the threads are there; you, by incarnating, become a bundle of threads, and create a unique bundle. It isn’t the threads that are unique. They were always there. But you– or the part of you outside of time and space – has chosen to bundle those particular threads, which now form a unit. They are a unit in that you are one body and one psyche while you are in the world. When you are no longer a body and your psyche – this is another discussion, let’s leave that for the moment.
When you’re no longer a body, the – shall we say – the memory of the fact that those threads were bundled in a certain way at a certain time is what you might call a crystal, or you might call it the remnants of a spool, or whatever. That is – to the degree that something on this side is an individual – that’s an individual.
Are you with us? The threads haven’t changed. The threads are always there, and all the other threads are still there, and your having bundled these threads says nothing about who will bundle any other combination of threads which may or may not include some of the threads you just used. There’s not competition and there’s not scarcity or anything; they’re all available. But what is scarce – if you want to put it that way – is individuals. Because there’s only one combination of threads, in one time and place, that is you, and that’s your uniqueness.
Now, that uniqueness has its own –. Again, let’s go back to our other analogy, which seems to you sometimes contradictory. That uniqueness can be looked at as a crystal, because this is a characteristic way of seeing things, and of being, now. You as an individual living in space-time have a characteristic point of view, and that point of view is your gift to this side.
Again, one of the things we’re stripping out of this discussion is multiple realities. But again, we can’t discuss everything at the same time. We’re simplifying, just as you simplified to make a painting. So leaving out multiple realities and also treating time as if it really existed, what we’re saying is, you gather the threads, you live the threads, you live them and your point of view that is fused becomes a crystal. If nothing interesting happens through that gathering of threads, as we’ve said before, you’re regarded as not crystallized. Or, another way of looking at it is, it was just nothing anybody will ever need again, it’s not useful. You can get everything you want from another person who experienced all the same things but did more with them, or saw more, or whatever.
Tell us when we lose you.
Rita: Yes, I appreciate the last part of the answer, since that was my next question. One more thing, we’ve looked at the time of leaving the body. What, in terms of the threads, are present at birth?
Frank: Would you rephrase the question?
Rita: You’ve talked about the situation when the person moves out of the physical, leaves the physical behind. I’m wondering, at the birth of an individual, the threads that are present in that picture at that time – who come with the body, so to speak – before they begin picking up additional thread strings this lifetime.
Frank: [pause] Are you asking where do the threads come from? No, you’re asking, what chooses the threads?
Rita: Well first of all, there are threads already present when the person is born, is that so?
Frank: Sure, because the being born is a gathering of threads, in a way.
Rita: Choosing those characteristics that will be part of that life.
Frank: Although of course it happens when the person chooses to go into the physical, which is before conception, but for our purposes we can say at birth, yes. In other words, when you choose to come into the world, that’s the choosing of threads.
Rita: So that we would think of those as the genetic factors that comes with the person.
Frank: Well, no. The genetic factors are one part, but then there are all the parts that are, shall we say, from the soul’s genesis. There’s a physical heredity but there’s also a soul heredity. You bring in past baggage (if you want to look at it negatively) or resources (if you want to look at it positively) from the soul, just as well as you do from the body. Which is why, to hark back to our discussion about cloning a while ago, someone asked about cloning and we told them, they’ll give up on cloning after a while because, although they can replicate the physical genetic part of it, they’ll be very disappointed to find they cannot replicate either the time – that is to say, the astrological factors that determine what can or cannot be going into a body – and they cannot duplicate the soul. So it will be very disappointing to them to find that they’re not able to do anything except replicate the physical vessel. They won’t have predictable – you know, what they’re looking for. (Digression, but it’s an important one perhaps.)
You said genetic material, and we need to be sure that you understand that it’s much more than genetic material that goes into determining the characteristics of the bundle.
Rita: All right, that’s very clear, thank you. In the process of doing the cloning experiments and so on, will it be – this almost sounds like a prediction, and I don’t want to ask that –
Frank: We’ll give it in terms of numbers of realities, if you wish.
Rita: As the experimentation goes on, they’re obviously focusing now on the physical component, not the spiritual ones.
Frank: They don’t recognize the spiritual components.
Rita: Mm-hmm, and that will come when they start trying to clone human beings? Or maybe are cloning human beings?
Frank: What will happen is that at some point the data will overwhelm their preconceptions, and they’ll realize “oh, given that we are cloning, and we know that it’s physically identical, and given that we’re doing it in the same laboratories so we’re –“
At first they will attempt to explain away the differences as differences in environment, but that will be so flimsy, what will ultimately happen is, it will collapse. They’ll say, “we’ve eliminated genetic difference, we’ve basically eliminated environmental difference, by God there must be something else!” And at this point, this particular dead end in research will actually prove productive, because it will by negatives have demonstrated that there’s more to you, more, and more primary, than the physical.
Rita: [pause] All right. Is there anything more you’d like to say about that before we move to a somewhat different topic?
Frank: No, your ball game.
Rita: [pause] Frank and I have been discussing, and would like to ask, about the ways that others have described the reincarnation process. It implies that sometimes for example things that are even visible can be carried from one lifetime to another, such as body scars or something of that sort. How do we integrate that kind of thinking with the kind you’re describing?
Frank: Well, just by sheer happenstance, and merest coincidence, this brings us to our next lesson. [laughs] [Wise guys] [laughs]
Rita: I’m glad we’re on the same page.
Frank: So far — and we mean everything we’ve done for four years with you up till now – we have been attempting (and the picture is a culmination of this attempt) to give you an idea of the difference between this side and your side so as to at least downplay if not eliminate the idea of individuals, as if an individual were a real, irreducible unit. And we think we have succeeded entirely in that. You do understand, and make it quite clear that you understand, why we see individuals as convenient fictions.
So that all of our discussion now culminates, at one level, at saying that there are threads of personality traits, there are aptitudes, aversions, weaknesses — all of those things – that can be put together as bundles. Those bundles live a life and then at the end of the life that bundle is still there in what we would call a crystal, but threaded through to all the other crystals. That life is still there, and it is an example. It is a lens, it is a – demonstration. This is what happens when you bundle these particular threads in this time, and you see what happens.
So we’ve given all of that as an example, and, you realize, this is a complicated thing to try to explain to you. And we think that it’s been explained as best we need to, provided you can hold in your minds all of the things that is impossible for you to hold together in space-time:
[Such as] time doesn’t really exist, but appears to. Nonetheless separation exists, and as you move along it looks like a progression of time.
Such as, all of the various realities exist, but only one at a time appears to.
Such as, all of your various lifetimes that you connect with, along a thread, exist, but only one at a time appears to.
Do you see, the common thread there is that your consciousness while you’re inside a space-time body necessarily is in one time, one place, one reality, one dimension, one possibility, one lifetime. One of everything. And everything else seems either like a memory, or a foreshadowing or a possibility or a fantasy.
Now, we realize this is very long, but this is all prelude. So what we’re saying is, in the past few years, working diligently with you (perhaps we should say that the opposite way around, working with your diligence, but you know what we mean) we have laid all that groundwork out, and it’s up to you to be able to put it together again so that from this framework we can now move to the next level. Because it is as if we have been telling you how a body is organically connected, without talking about the consciousness that goes into that body. Or it is as if we were talking about nerves, without talking about how the nerves form a neural net. You see what we’re saying? We’re going now to the next level of complexity, up.
Now, tell us if you’re still with us this far, before we go farther.
Rita: I think I am.
Frank: All right. [pause]
Now, holding all of this explanation of the world, as best you can, inside your brains – and we recognize that a vastly complicated thing this is, because your natural neural switching systems (you remember, holding you on from moment to moment as you move along time)– It’s very difficult for you to hold all this, even within reachable consciousness, if we should call it that.
We are very much approving of the effort that you’re making, and you doesn’t mean Rita, it doesn’t mean Skip, it doesn’t mean Frank, it means all those who are reading this, hearing this, whatever, anywhere in what is your future. This is meant for more than the three of you, obviously. As you already know.
[pause] Now, [pause]
Perhaps you’ll find this of interest, as well. This pause is not so much for us to get our breath as it is to move Frank’s – sort of to blank out his slate so that he actually has less of that in his immediate awareness now, for the purpose of us putting something else in the immediate awareness. That may be of interest to you, just as process.
Rita: It is, yes.
Frank: And it also serves the purpose of stretching a few moments of time between where he was and now, so that that also serves the same thing of blanking out the slate. The reason for this is, there is a natural and a necessary tendency to try to connect each new thing with what’s already in the slate. So wiping the slate first makes it easier to bring in new things without attempting to stitch them together. Okay? That by the way would be a profitable topic for us to explore at another time, because it will explain things that you as an educator have experienced over years. However, not now.
Okay. Though you might think so, we have not lost track at all of your question, and as we say, this is the next level to go to.
[pause] At any level of consciousness, it appears that your surroundings are what is. If you are walking along a path in the woods, or in an open field, your eyes, your ears and your nose, by drawing to you various sensations originating elsewhere, create inside of you a mental palette that says trees, fresh air, breeze, flowers, blah, blah, blah, okay? You create for yourself within yourself a landscape. Now, we’re not here going into the question of whether the landscape exists when you don’t create it; that’s not our intent. But what we mean to say is, that if you’re walking along, what you become aware of are at the same level that you’re walking. So that you see the trees from ground level. You see clouds, if you see them, from ground level. You see what is within eyeshot, and you hear –
Well, wait, let’s leave it at visually. It will be simpler. You see what you can see until it’s blocked by an object. The object that you see, by itself, blocks what’s ever behind it. Again, we’re going to keep it simple, so we’re not going into the other senses, but that’s what we’re saying. At the level you’re in, you see what’s appropriate to be seen at your level. But were you then to get into a hot air balloon, and go up 50 feet and look around, what you look at would not only be different, it would also be wider. It would be, not only –
You wouldn’t see the same thing at a different level of height. You’d see what you had seen, from a different angle of view, and adding in that third dimension changes everything and to a degree falsifies what you had seen. [pause] Now, we mean “falsifies” from that new point of view only, of course. We don’t mean that your new view is real and the other view wasn’t real, we mean that any two points of view are, to a degree, incompatible, and it is by moving between one and the other that you get the reality in between. From your new vantage point in the hot air balloon, the old relationships look somewhat falsified, because you see a different pattern of relationships. And that’s the process that we’re in now. We’re going to take you up a little bit in a hot air balloon to go over the process that we’ve just described.
[pause] Now, you’ll notice that in all of our discussion heretofore, the question of purpose has gotten pretty nearly obscured. We have been talking extensively about the “how” of things, and not about the “why” of things, and the reason for that was because our pedagogical technique was to try to give you three or four or five different ways of seeing the same reality so that those different metaphors, when compared against each other, or when alternated from one to the other, or when put in a sort of blurry multiple-vision approach, would give you a sense of something that is nearly incomprehensible inside time-space. You can’t see it straight on. You can only see it by glimpses out of the side of your eye, and that’s what we’ve been doing.
Now that you’ve got a pretty firm handle on that, now we move to the level of meaning, moving one level up. However, remember that being 50 feet up in a hot air balloon is not the same as flying in an X-15 or in a space shuttle — or a spaceship. You know what we’re saying: This isn’t the only other level, but it is an other level, and this is where we can go next.
A good analogy would be Bob Monroe’s way of saying that Focus 10, 12, and 15 were clearings in a forest, and people could go from one clearing to the other, because they could see one clearing from the next, and it would allow them to go beyond the edge of the forest, and reduce the fear factor. In your cases it’s not the fear factor, so much as the “ungrounded” factor. We’re attempting to help you to ground it all, and that means a tremendous amount of redundant description, and it means a lot of seemingly contradictory analogy, because like the Lilliputians holding down Gulliver with a thousand threads – sorry to use the word “threads” again [laughs] – that’s what we’re attempting to do here.
So now let’s move up to that hot air balloon 50 feet above the surface.
[pause]
Up to this point we’ve treated you as if you were epiphenomena. Now we’re going to show the impulse of will that created the impulse to discover the phenomenon. That is to say, you incarnated in order to pull together certain threads, live that experience, and bring back that lived experience as the gift to all that is. But who’s the “you” that’s incarnating? Who’s the “you” that’s before the personality-you?
Just as Bob Monroe invented new terms that would be morally and associationally neutral, so we’re going to do the same thing. A study of scriptures would provide many of the same or similar glimpses as we’re trying to give, but because the scriptural descriptions have had so many connotations attached to them, we are attempting, as you well know, to divorce our descriptions from that so that you could see with new eyes.
[pause] Now, we’re working backwards which is a little difficult and might be interesting; let’s see how it works. We’re going to work backwards from you as an individual, up a level, again in the interest of going from the familiar to the less familiar. Or, another way of looking at it is, to keep it grounded. If we were to start and say, well, “here’s God and here are the angels,” it begins ungrounded, and it’s a very undesirable to do in this kind of description, because there’s no word in your language that has more emotional and other connotations than the word “God.” So we’re staying away from it, and the saints and the angels and all that for the moment, and work our way backwards.
But we’ll leave you this little parenthesis, which is, spiritual descriptions have always been people’s best attempts to describe in the language they knew and in the metaphors that were available to them, what they themselves had experienced and been overwhelmed by.
[pause] Now give us a moment here.
[long pause]
[s] The specific question that brought this to your minds was the question of reincarnation and the perplexity as to how reincarnation, with its implicit needs and desires and results could be squared with our somewhat static description of reality as bundles of threads that are themselves worthwhile.
You will remember that a while ago we gave you a description that said, you have a bundle, and that bundle has tendencies that haven’t been balanced and we said, there is no inherent need to balance those – it isn’t like that bundle has to reincarnate to balance those energies. Do you remember that?
Rita: Yes, I do.
Frank: Well, now we’re going to contradict ourselves, because we’ll move it at another level. It’s quite true, the bundle has no need to do that. The person that was, was. When Rita –
Let’s look at it a different way. There is a completed Rita. The completed Rita will never have an opportunity to live in the 1800s. The completed Rita will never have an opportunity to live in the 2100s. As Rita. That crystal, that bundle of threads, that – um –
Well, we’ll call you a being. I don’t know what else to do here. That person, that individual, that bundle, or anything you want to call it, has only limited opportunities because of time-space. It didn’t exist [within space-time] before you incarnated, it didn’t exist after you ceased to incarnate, after you’ve moved over, within space-time. So you understand what we’re saying: There are limits set to bodies. The limits that are set to bodies are also set to the individual.
Now, we’ll give a caveat just for the far future. We’re not going to pursue it here. The limits aren’t what they seem to be, because if there’s one version of you that dies at age two, and another version of you that dies at 60, and another version that dies at age 80, and another version that dies at age 100—you know what we’re saying – the limit of the completed being extends as far as the farthest limits not only in time but in other ways of any version of the completed being. Nonetheless there are limits.
Now, holding that – what we’re attempting to say is, the completed Rita – or, okay, let’s do it a different way. The completed Bob Monroe. The version that you’re aware of died in the year 1995. There are versions that died earlier and later. But say that the last version died in 1995. Let’s say the one you’re familiar with was the very last version. (Not true, but so what?) To say that the Bob Monroe then reincarnated –
Again, you see, it’s the same semantic thing that we’ve been fighting against to be really, really sure that you don’t make that jump.
The bundle goes nowhere. That bundle never reincarnates. However, there are threads, and the threads obviously extend, and those threads extend in other lifetimes, as was just painted for you. Well and good. But beyond that, the – let’s call it impulse – that became the bundle that was Bob Monroe, the impulse that incarnated, experienced Bob Monroe, came out the other side, so to speak, and moved on.
Now, that impulse always will be connected to the crystal that was Bob Monroe. [pause]
Well, now, let’s see. Let’s think how to describe this. Obviously, if this were easily described it would have been done long ago.
You see, we’re–. [pause] There are very close descriptions called “soul” and “spirit” that we’re avoiding. [pause] And perhaps [pause]
We’ll go so far as to say, the traditional description of a person as being a body, a soul and a spirit is close enough to saying, the body, the incarnating impetus (the spirit) and the crystal (the soul). We don’t want to lean on that too much, but it’s a good – actually that will be a grounding force itself. Just don’t jump to too many assumptions. Because you think that you know what a soul is, don’t assume that everything people think they mean when they say “soul” is what we mean, or is what is. Same with “spirit.” However, using those two does help a little.
Rita and Frank are both aware of Peter Novak’s books [The Division of Consciousness, and The Lost Secret of Death] and they are giving you a good description of the way that the incarnation happens, from the point of view of individuals. And so you might find it worthwhile to read those, and re-read them if you can, holding our viewpoint. Not yet, though. Wait a while. When we have sketched what we need to say, and then you read it from the point of view of an individual, you’ll be able to triangulate between our description and his, and you’ll get a grounding duality of vision.
Now, don’t think we don’t know that we haven’t begun to say anything here. But it’s a vast [laughs] task.
All right, let’s see. How do we do this. We go back to – all right—well, the [pause]
[yawns] It’s interesting, it’s like they leave me along for a minute. I don’t know why.
Rita: Mm-hmm. Well, use the break well.
Frank: I think what they’re doing is compounding a new cover story. [pause] I have to say that, for the first time ever in our sessions, I’m getting hot, so I’m going to move a hand and take this blanket off. That’s never occurred before. [yawns]
[change sides of tape]
Frank: … and then from the parts of the mind that you are experiencing, and then into what you don’t experience actively, is not only to go from the familiar to the unfamiliar, but it’s to hold on. Because, we could easily lose the thread between Frank and us by moving too far away. It’s your equivalent of clicking out. If we give you something that gives you nothing to cling to, what can happen is you come back from your experience with nothing. You’ve had an experience, you know you’ve had an experience, but you click out; you have no memory of it, because you’re had nothing to associate it to, and your minds are vast associating-machines.
So what we’re doing here is backing up an inch at a time so that he can stay with us. As we’re doing that, it’s becoming more vague and vacuous, and we’re having to – you might say – provide interim content in order to hold the carrier beam.
What we are attempting to convey has been easily described by people, quite straightforwardly, but not in the way that we’re attempting to do it, in a way that will continually ground it and hold it. What typically happens is, you go off to a description of something well beyond your ordinary reality and then you come back, and that’s not what we’re doing here.
You need a description right now of what you are before you go into the body, and what you are once you’ve come out of the body again (bearing in mind that, as always, this holds the time dimension as though it were realer than it is; there’s no alternative here) you need a description of what you are when you are outside the body, before and after. This description gives you the sense of why you went in, what you’re accomplishing while you’re in there, what has happened to you on the far side.
And perhaps the best way we can do that is for you to imagine relatively flat planes. Now, supposing you were to think of all of your reality as a thick, thick piece of paper. This paper is perhaps – oh, say it’s a half an inch thick; it’s more like fiberboard. And all of those interactions that were painted, all of the threads that have been gathered in one place and extend to others, where some of them are gathered and others are gathered elsewhere – all of that is happening within a plane a half an inch thick.
Then you move above that plane to something that’s not there [chuckles] (And if that doesn’t make you smile, it certainly should) and enter another plane. And this plane is similarly comprised. This plane looks somewhat like the one you just left, in the sense that it has a wilderness of threads, a [pause] network of gatherings of threads, an overarching pattern formed by the gathering of threads, etc.
Now, we don’t want you to jump to the words “astral plane.” Because, we’re making an analogy but we’re not talking about the astral planes, which are of course themselves an analogy, but somewhat different. What we’re saying to you here is, this second plane that we’re in is a level of increased complexity such that every piece of this new plane is the entire former plane. Now, don’t expect that to make sense yet. Your hologram analogy always comes in useful. You could say that your entire – let’s call the plane that we have been discussing up until today, plane A. Just A. It is the one that’s easiest for you to interpret, experience, while you’re in the physical body. So that’s plane A.
Above it is plane B, somewhat parallel to it, somewhat reflective of it, but every point in plane A can be experienced in one point in plane B.
Now [pause] obviously the part of Plane A that you experience – no matter who it is who’s reading or listening to this – obviously the part of the plane that you experience is a very limited part. Reality is huge, and your own extension is tiny. Plane B is able to gather up huge amounts of plane A and put them in an area no larger to us than yours is to you. So – perhaps a way of saying it is, plane B [pause] is roughly configured in the way that plane A is, but every point in plane B contains huge amounts of plane A. So that, things that appear to you to be quite different and diffuse, to us are all part of the same thing.
As one example, perhaps a misleading one, to you the difference between 2000 BC and 4000 AD is huge, in the same way that the difference between Shanghai China and Lima Peru is huge in terms of distance, climate, people, history, every bit of it. There’s a big difference, all right?
What is 6,000 years to you is a minute to us, and 6,000 miles to you is no distance at all to us. Not because we’re superior, not because we’re wiser, not even, exactly, because we’re out of the body, but because the nature of our plane is to encompass so much more than yours.
Now, every situation has its own defects. The defects and the advantages are the same thing; it’s strictly a matter of point of view. You see detail much easier than we do (unless we focus in on it really strongly), because, well, if you were the size of the neuron [you’d see a neuron] net in a way that you could never understand it as a person your size looking at it through a microscope. However, the person looking through a microscope understands it in a way that you could never understand it from that miniature point of view. If you’re a pygmy you see a horse in an entirely different way than if you’re a human, or if you’re a mountain. It’s the same horse! But the scale perspective is hugely different.
So, that’s as far as we’re going to go today, we think, in this particular question. We don’t mind going elsewhere, but we want to start by establishing in your minds the concept of a parallel plane, the scale of which is vastly larger than yours. It is as though we have to see you through a microscope. [pause] And we will tell you that are planes – no, we will tell you no such thing. We will leave it at that, at the moment.
Again, don’t confuse what we’re talking about with what people call the astral planes. Those are two entirely different subjects that happen to use the same name. But “plane” is a useful word, because it implies something which stretches endlessly, has a certain thickness and has a certain division from what it is not. So, let’s leave that there at the moment.
Now, we’ll answer questions on this, but we won’t go farther on it other than questions, for this time. And we’ll talk about anything else you want. We want you first to brood on this new idea for a while.
Rita: We’re trying to do that, and also to formulate a question about it. One of the issues in this which you’ve described, I think, is that we have been thinking in terms of various different systems, all of which have somewhat different language. The crystal language, the threads and spools, and impulse language that you’re using, none of which are we very good at in the sense of total understanding.
Frank: It’s not so much that you’re not good at it, it’s that they’re inadequate representations of reality, and you are attempting to experience something that you can never experience sensorily and so must experience through your imagination.
Rita: [pause] Without moving farther than you have in this, can you say something about the direction we’re going.
Frank: Well, yes. Ultimately, what you’re going to see is that what appear to you to be impulses or threads, or what appear to you to be the results of individual lives – we’ll leave it at that for the moment –viewed from another level will be seen to be individuals themselves, a different kind of individual. And ultimately this individual too will prove to be a convenient fiction. But we are underlining the fact that we’re changing the scale of things significantly, so that you will be able to get some meaning in a way that you would never get if we stayed at the same scale.
If you were to experience the neural net in a human body from a neural size, the complexity, the extent and all of it would be very evident to you, but it would be very difficult for you to hold it together in your mind, because there’s too much of it. By moving up to another level, you see it much less clearly and much less detailed-ly (and actually you get, to a degree, a falsified view, because you’re seeing it from above) but you do get a different view, which will help you — by going between the two — to see it better.
[pause] We feel like we’re saying the same thing three or four times, and if we over-redundant-ize ourselves [laughs] let us know, but we can’t think of a better way than to say the same thing several times, slightly differently.
Rita: Well, that proved to be helpful when we were first beginning, and was necessary to get us on the track at all.
Frank: You see how far you’ve come! You were nowhere near this when we began. But what was the point of our saying, “no, you’ve got it hopelessly wrong.” [laughs] So–
Rita: And maybe it wasn’t hopeless.
Frank: No, of course not. But it would have seemed –. We could easily say to you that there’s no way for you to understand any of this, and in a sense that’s true. But in a larger, more useful sense, it’s not at all true. You can get a somewhat distorted view of it, enough to make a difference for yourselves. [pause] And you’re doing it.
Rita: We started out with the question of how to think about the difference between the perspective you’re giving us, and the usual view of reincarnation that people have described. So that we’re now moving to a level where that issue will be explained? Among others.
Frank: It’ll be transformed, actually. You see, one of the reasons why we’re so ponderous and so repetitious is that it is important for you to have the real sense of something seen only from one set of points of view. In other words, you start from one that is within a body in time-space, and that was so automatic that we had to move you out of that. And now that you’re comfortable with the other one, A, now we’re going to move you to B. And B will show you everything in a different light, and it’s true that what you have learned about A will be falsified. We’ll say, “well, see, this isn’t really true because–.”
But none of it was wasted or detour, because it’s necessary for you to build a scaffolding to get high up on a building. You’re not building a scaffolding because you like scaffolding, you’re building a scaffolding in order to get somewhere. When you’re finally there, and when you’re finished with the job, then the scaffolding disappears – which, we would point out, is just what all religious teachers have told you, and have usually not been listened to. People get attached to the scaffolding, forgetting that it was just a way to turn their heads in a certain direction. (Or, we really should say “to turn their hearts,” but that distinction’s not obvious yet.)
So, we have not at all lost sight of the difference between people’s experience of reincarnation and what we have described as level A. We are also not saying that they’re wrong. What we are saying is, that description is a description that takes individual existence too much for granted. It takes the existence of time too much for granted. It certainly overlooks, usually, entirely, the existence of alternate realities. So what we’re going to do, with luck and persistence, is create the scaffolding for you to see that in a way which will then reconcile it with our other jury-rigged scaffolding. You remember that we said at one time, the purpose of making an analogy, and then making an entirely different analogy, is that there are very few associations common to both, and it helps strip off the unwanted ones. [pause] This will be just another part of that process.
Rita: And so from the perspective we’re moving to, the nature of questions will change because the basic assumptions are changing?
Frank: Sure. Your questions are very different from the ones you asked four years ago.
Rita: And hopefully I’ll be able to continue here. [laughs]
Frank: Well, there’s no reason to think you won’t.
Rita: All right.
Frank: Also, you do realize, we have the crib sheet. We can look at the completed result. [laughs] So we know what’s a waste of effort and what isn’t, and we don’t do the waste of effort.
Rita: Is this fair?
Frank: No! [laughs] Did we promise fair? But it is helpful.
Rita: To us as well as to you.
Frank: Of course. [pause] Well, again, that’s a meaningless distinction. If you stub your toe and someone heals your toe, is it a meaningful distinction to say that it was helpful to the toe as opposed to helpful to you? It can be if you’re working at a specific level for some reason, but really, in actual fact, if your toe’s better, you’re better. [pause] So, if it’s helpful to you, it is helpful to us.
Rita: We’re not complaining, we’re just noting the difficulties here.
Frank: You want to hear complaining? [laughs] Try it from our side! [pause] And we’re not complaining either, this is fun. But it is intricate. [pause] You might have a difficulty sometimes remembering that we have difficulties. We’re not all-perfect and everything is cool with us. We’re struggling, the same as you’re struggling, moment by moment so to speak.
Rita: You’re reminded us of that several times.
Frank: Well, people have a tendency to put us on a pedestal, and we just continually step off of it. [pause] Just like – for instance. You don’t necessarily have perfect teachers, here. Perhaps others could do better, but we’re here with you. We’re absolutely the best teachers that you have, among those who are here. [laughs]
Rita: And if we were to think about you as individuals, for a moment, there are several of you participating in this teaching process, is that right?
Frank: In a few weeks you will see what’s wrong with your question. Let’s leave the question and kind of bookmark the question, and in a few weeks you will see why that is not a meaningful question from our point of view. It’s not a dumb question, but it’s not a meaningful question – from our point of view. And when you get to our understanding of our point of view, you will have come quite a ways farther. We don’t mean it will take a long time, we mean your understanding will have leaped another level.
Remember that question, though. Write it out, if necessary, separately.
Rita: All right. That’s an example of what I was saying; the questions will also be changing because of these – well, we don’t know what.
Frank: Well, you know, your questions also serve a valuable purpose because later they remain as a record of where you were then, so that what seemed to you once a reasonable question (a very reasonable, obvious question, and we don’t imagine that you expected more than a five-word answer) of “how many of you are there?” – you now begin to see why you could never get a straight answer to it. But the fact that you had that question as a reasonable question then remains as a sort of a beacon, a marker, and helps to show you the difference between where you were and where you are. Not just so that you can pat yourselves on your backs and say “look how smarter we are,” but as a sort of a triangulation as to where you are. [pause] You might ask why that’s important, but it’ll help.
[pause] And I’ll tell you what, I’m lying here thinking, “I’ve been working hard, this session.” I don’t know why; this is hard!
Rita: Mm-hmm.
Frank: Oh. They’re telling me why. Because it’s farther away. It’s – Why should that be harder?
It’s as though my attention is being stretched, not between objects of attention, but between focuses of attention. Well – go ahead, Rita.
Rita: I have the feeling that one of the difficulties is that you’re on a thin line between operating in a realm in which you can talk to us, and drifting beyond that, where you can’t talk to us.
Frank: That has happened, but in this case, it’s more like it’s easy for me to talk, but hard to know – what’s coming. Not what’s coming, but hard to – I don’t know. I’ll think about it. I can probably think about that outside and come up with an answer.
It certainly has a different flavor to it, though. It reminds me of the time that I was in and I came out and said to Skip, “God, you know, this was so strange, I kept losing things and this and that,” and he laughed and he said, “yeah, you were dancing the null. You were spending the whole time dancing the null point. And that’s the only time that had ever happened, and it was qualitatively different from the other sessions. This one is sort of different too, but not in that same sense. I’m not in danger of losing contact with you, or even with my thoughts; it’s like somehow hard work, but I cant tell you what the work is. [pause] It’s like it’s hard work even to hold – I don’t know.
I mean, I’m fine, I’m not complaining, it’s just strange. I wouldn’t have thought that I could go into the black box and come up with a new total feeling. But this is different.
Rita: Does the feeling relate to where you are in relation to the guys?
Frank: [pause] It’s almost like it’s where I am in relation to the material. Like, you know how we’ve talked about how it’s hard for me to bring facts in, sometimes? Like if they were giving us the Battle of Hastings and they said 1065 instead of 1066, I’d clutch up, you know. But if we were looking for the number and they couldn’t find it, I’d also clutch up, because I’d say, “you ought to know that.”
Like, when they talked about World War II the other day, they said America was different in 1938 than it was in 1946, or whatever they said, and I knew that those weren’t the dates that we came in and out of, but I also knew that that’s not what they were attempting to do, so it didn’t bother me. But often when we go looking for a fact, like when was Bertram born, or whatever, I have to let that anxiety aside, as best I can, and let come what comes. That’s not what’s happening today. Today it’s – today it’s like a strain to get anything. [pause] There’s no anxiety about “will there be a wrong answer” or something, but there’s a lot of –
A physical equivalent would be like listening for a distant sound, but that’s not a good one. I don’t know. Anyway, we can go on. It’s just a strange feeling. [yawns] I have no idea how long we’ve been doing this. Not very long, I think. Maybe 50 minutes?
Rita: Well, it’s a little more than that. Can we ask a question about your hearing?
Frank: Mm-hmm. [pause] What? What’d you say? [they laugh]
Rita: See if you can get any relevant information about that.
Frank: Well, can you point the question some?
Rita: What is the meaning level at which we can think about this hearing difficulty?
Frank: Ah! Yes. Okay. Oh, yeah. Good. [pause]
While you say that, I just noticed a change in the tones, just in these last few seconds. I can hear them now. I haven’t heard them until now. I think—Well, I don’t know. Guys, you take over. What’s the deal here?
It’s just a distancing technique. They do it every so often. [pause]
Although it’s annoying, it’s also distancing from the world, and serves as a painless way to hold – okay, this is worth a little more than this. Stop and go back a little bit.
One of the reasons that I can do this, is that I had asthma all those years, because one of the things you can use physical discomfort for is to hold your place, so you maintain – (Ooh boy. How in the world–?)
[pause] I know what we’re trying to say here, but the words – hang on a minute.
[pause] Typically, as we go through the day, we move around all the time, without noticing it. And although we think it’s always us, the person who’s there at 10:45 is not necessarily the same person who’s there at 11:15; is not necessarily the same person who’s there an hour later. This explanation is going to make a lot more sense in a few weeks. But for the moment, just take that as given – that we slide around a lot, so that although we seem to ourselves to have continuity of consciousness, in actual fact we don’t, we move around. It is as though – not exactly “as though” – we have different people taking over at different times. They sort of hand the torch over to each other.
One use of a physical discomfort can be to hold the same person there over long periods of time, and that’s what’s often happened with Frank with asthma, and it is also happening with the ears, and it’s very convenient. And it’s much more convenient, because it doesn’t debilitate him, and so he can work while this is happening.
This is far from the only way that such continuity can be preserved, but he’s not used to the mental discipline of doing it that yoga, as an example, would give, or other mental disciplines. This is one reason why he’s been able to do what he can do without having those disciplines, is, he’s had this de facto gyroscope, shall we call it. No. Anchor is not right either. You know – in other words, he is held to a place by the physical discomfort, and that’s not a bad way for him to function. It’s perfectly fine. The ear varies enough to not be too boring, and sometimes the ringing gets quite loud, which renews his attention on it, which stops it from becoming background and thus allowing him to slip away again. And other times gets low to increase the comfort level, and also because variations help him to stay there. Not that he’s ever thinking of it in those terms, but you asked the meaning level of it; that’s the meaning of it.
We would suggest to you that some people do have – various illnesses for just the same reason. Were someone to have, say, gout that was just at a discomfort level without overwhelming their universe. You know, if you have too much pain, you can’t think of anything but it.
There’s your answer. Manageable discomfort can be used quite advantageously to hold you, so that one aspect of yourself remains in charge over periods of time, rather than different aspects of yourself handing over.
[pause] Again, in a little bit of time, this answer will mean much more to you.
Rita: Okay, we’ll take that on faith.
Frank: And again of course, between the lines, the answer is “don’t worry about the ear, there’s nothing wrong.”
Rita: [pause] So I’m hearing you say that physical discomfort is one way of managing this attention phenomena.
Frank: That’s right.
Rita: And presumably there are other ways?
Frank: Well, as we say, anything that concentrates on keeping a clear mind over time has the side-effect – though it’s not necessarily recognized – of keeping the same individual in charge, at the same time.
We would actually say to you that dieting can be used that way, because if a part of you is hungry all the time and is aware of it, that awareness can be used to keep the same person in charge. The difficulty is – and the same with the ear or anything else – something of absorbing interest that comes by may move you entirely over to that, and you forget about being hungry, or you forget about your ear hurting, or you forget that you were trying to hold blank mind, or you forget that you were attempting to meditate on God, or maintain a yoga posture, or whatever. They’re all various ways of accomplishing the same invisible task of keeping the same person in charge longer than it normally would want to be in charge.
You can look in the Gurdjieff work, and he’s talking continuously about alternate `I’s. And each I that gets in charge thinks it’s the only I, and the other I’s are forgotten about. It’s the same thing.
[pause] But, as we say, all of those subjects will be vastly clarified as we explain more about the other plane. But it will take a little bit. Right now – for your information – Frank is totally a blank as to what the next plane is all about, other than the idea of magnification and holograms. So he’s learning as you’re learning.
Rita: Just keeping in the here and now, he is both having some issue with the ear, and he’s dieting. He needs this combination?
Frank: Well, you know, you’re in a free-will universe, this is his choice. It certainly doesn’t hurt him at all to have two focuses of continual background discomfort. But it isn’t like we gave him the idea to diet now in order for this to become possible. But it doesn’t hurt it either. In some realities he’s doing it at the same time, and in others he’s not.
Rita: I guess the question I had is whether it was necessary to have this combination to move in the direction that you’re talking about.
Frank: We’re saying it’s not necessary. It works, but it’s not necessary. Either one would have worked. Others would have worked.
Rita: And when we think in these terms, what part of us is operating at that level?
Frank: Aha! Defer that question as well. It’s an excellent question. Defer it.
Rita: I see.
Frank: [laughs] You’re right on beam.
Rita: Good. That being so, it’s time to think about moving back, ending this session. So I just ask if there’s anything else we need to hear right now.
Frank: Yes. This is something you need to hear. Your work – and by your we mean you, Rita; Skip, Frank, and everybody who eventually gets involved in this process even to the extent of reading it, but also to the extent of doing their own experimentations. Your work is important to us. We are very grateful to have the opportunity to do the work with you. And we can’t emphasize that enough. The attention that people give to interfacing with the other side is an important gift that will repay them, and also repays us. This isn’t like us giving you a unilateral gift. This is very much a two-way process. We cannot emphasize that enough.
Rita: And we are always happy to hear that.
Frank: In other words, thank you.
Rita: So there’s lots of gratitude, going both ways, sounds like.
Frank: Both ways.
[end transcript]