Rita on experiencing various versions and strands

Friday February 27, 2015

F: 3:30 a.m. Good morning, Rita. Big day, yesterday. Your suggestion met response. Back to questions, today, or do you have more you would like to say?

R: I want to second the motion about your taking care of your health as we do this. Your correspondent issued a warning that this could take an emotional toll as you proceed. Well, it doesn’t need to, but it could. A little preventive maintenance would be just as well.

F: For others, I take it, not just for me.

R: Of course.

F: And such maintenance would be?

R: Nothing you haven’t been told in the past, but that isn’t to say that you have paid much attention. You needn’t establish protective rituals unless ritual itself appeals to you, but you should remain aware that your mind belongs to you; that you in the physical have the right to make decisions and no one else does (for yourself, that is, of course); that you will need to remember to keep to a middle course, opening to the unknown but not losing touch with mundane reality.

In short, establish your intent firmly; you wish to explore, you wish to be of service, you wish to grow in a healthy direction, you wish to preserve your autonomy without either retreating into isolation or losing your protective boundaries. Those who prefer ritual should invent a ritual expressing this. Those who do not prefer ritual should still find a way not to forget that these are the boundaries within which your explorations proceed. Now we may start on questions.

F: Just in order?

R: Sure. Just as Charles stacks them up.

F: Okay, here goes.

[Chey’s question: At other times the Guys and Rita have talked about the completed being after we drop the body. I believe the guys said that the completed being is a compilation of our 3D life as “experienced” by the 3D individual AND the experiences of that same being having lived all those other possible paths. In other words, while we were in the body, we could choose among all possible paths, and only choose one to consciously shine our little 5% (or whatever) flashlight on, but all paths are actually taken. Is the combination of all those possible paths taken compile [sic] the completed being? Or is it something different? I assume that if this or something like it is accurate, that completed being would also have memories of all those other paths.

[If so, we are actually so very much more than we could ever even begin to dream!

[And, do all those other paths that were lived but not chosen also affect our lives as we experience it with our flashlight every day, now?]

R: Initially, you will remember, the guys groped for a way to explain to us the reason you (or anyone, of course) might reach another life in its state of awareness at that moment (the life in process, they called it) or might reach it after the storm of everyday life was passed and it had a vantage-point over the entire life as lived, the completed being. This was a necessary but unsufficient step toward continuing to redefine our ideas so that we could become able to learn more.

F: To understand A, etc.

R: Exactly. Had you and I begun from a different place, the explanations that would have led forward would necessarily have been different. That’s why different explorers bring home different maps of the same territory. What you see depends partly upon what you are capable of seeing, and that depends partly upon where you were when you set out. Thus, it is well not to try to judge different schemes of things in terms of “which is more correct,,” and better to judge them in terms of “where did the map maker start from, to produce these differences between this map and mine?” it does not good to abandon the maps you have made yourself in favor of another’s maps merely because that other has prestige in some form or another. The only reason to change is that you have found something that feels more correct than what you already had come to.

So, to return more closely to the question – today I would express it this way. The consciousness you are living at any given moment is aware of one path, even if that awareness is aware of multiple paths within the path, if that is not too confusing. In other words, no matter how complicated or rich your path is, complete with jumps to other timelines, awareness of multiple versions coexisting, etc., still you will experience your life as one path, not as several different paths even if that awareness shifts on you either slowly or rapidly. To be aware of – or, let’s put it this way, you are aware of just as much complexity as you can handle, and anything more is only theoretical [to you].

So, any given life-experience, no matter how complicated, is one path chosen among the many that might have been chosen. Looking at it from the path chosen, the completed-life-awareness sees only what it lived. It sees the results of its choices in that lifetime. It, itself, is the stable result of the experiment that that life was.

But looking at it from the point of view of the larger being from which the individual was formed, each completed-life-awareness is only one iteration, no more valuable, no less; no realer, no less, than all the others. So really we might refine our model from two to three. We still have (from the point of view of contact from 3D, which is all you have) the in-process awareness – Joseph on July 4, 1863. We have the completed-life representation – Joseph looking back on his life in the 19th century. But we also have – if we can get to it, which mostly depends on the level of awareness of the 3D questioner – another layer which I suppose we might call the larger being’s experience of Joseph in all iterations.

F: Not too snappy a label.

R: You are welcome to improve on it. But you see the point.

F: Oh yes. And I feel a little better about our stumbling around sometimes. It means we don’t have to get it right the first time.

R: And don’t have to stick to superseded ways of understanding, and don’t have to wonder if you’re making it all up. Given sincerity and openness and an intelligently critical attitude, you’ll get there. It is only when you begin to defend what you have already gotten that you will lose sight of greater understandings that might have followed.

So – again to return closely to the question at hand – we should say that the larger being has memories of all the paths any one consciousness created, or trod, whichever way you want to look at it. And you have access to the larger being by way of your direct connection, of course – your own non-3D component. Or, you can access any one iteration in detail; it depends on what you want, which depends partly on what you are.

Yes, you are more than you think. And you can learn to perceive more of what you are; it’s up to you.

As to the final part of the question – yes, everything you connect to affects your lives to greater or lesser extent, dependent upon many variables. The rule of thumb I would propose is, you will experience more connection or less connection depending mostly upon your willingness to do so, and also upon the appropriateness of such understanding to the path you are on, which are two categories that largely overlap but not always, and not necessarily. If you follow what feels right for you, you aren’t likely to go too far wrong.

F: Next question?

R: Yes. You will notice that this proceeds nicely from the previous question though Charles presumably did not line them up that way, given that he did not know how my answer would proceed.

F: Well, the two do have a relationship. He may have figured they were a logical progression.

R: You might ask him. I don’t think he did, consciously. At any rate, pose the second question.

[Cat’s Paw’s question: I’m curious about one’s relationship to one’s strands in non 3D. Do you interact “externally” with some or all of the strands that compose you as individual beings in their own right? Do you mostly know them as a part of your own being?

[I guess what I’m groping for is presumably one’s strands are living their own “lives,” yes? Their changes and transformations would affect you as yours affects them…? Now the image just popped into my head of strands/beings which, like family in the 3D world, don’t get on so well, but are stuck with one another because they are “family,” after all.]

R: The short answer is that outside of 3D, there is no perception of something being “external.” Once the conditions of 3D are transcended, it becomes clear that “external” merely meant, beyond the limits of the conscious awareness as it was bounded by 3D conditions – perception of separation, binding to the continuously moving present moment, delayed consequences, etc. Remove those conditions and you return to life as it really is. (But those conditions were imposed for a constructive reason, remember. 3D is not a punishment nor a school nor a feverish illusion, but an artificially devised greenhouse for growing compound beings in the only way they can be produced. At least, that’s one way of looking at it.)

So, yes, the image of family is a good one in that it suggests an on-going unbreakable relationship. Perhaps a better image would be – the bees in a hive, all living as individuals, all living as individual cells in a larger being that is less physical than metaphysical, almost, a “hive.” The hive – meaning, the sum total of the bees operating as part of one unit – is as real as the individual bees, yet could not exist without them. The bees are as individual as any 3D body that maintains itself, but, without the organizing principle that we are calling the hive, could not long exist and in any case would have no meaningful existence.

And that’s another hour.

F: So it is. Our thanks as always, and next time we will continue down the list or will again follow you down the rabbit hole, whichever you prefer.

R: “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.”

F: Don’t think we don’t all feel like the white rabbit sometimes, or the March Hare.

R: Better connections will help you feel less so.

F: If you say so.  Okay, next time.