April 1, 2015
F: 6 a.m. Well, Miss Rita, what of the second of John Wolf’s questions? Again, something I don’t know anything about, not having heard Martin’s session with whoever this was. By the way, I find it interesting that old Explorer tapes are being mentioned, in light of [TMI Board member] Al Dahlberg saying that TMI is considering starting that program back up again.
R: You thinking its time has come again. Well, it seems it has. I know you won’t be sorry to see it.
F: Hardly. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me. In fact, long overdue. So – aspects and strands?
[John Dorsey Wolf: “I was listening to #29 on Aspects, which coincidentally was introduced and monitored by Rita’s husband. The question is whether the aspects as described by that tape are related to the strands that Rita has used as an analogy of our spiritual make up. What I understood from the tape is that there are energies that are a part of us that help to produce physical life, but themselves have never been a human or experienced human life as we do. So are there `energies”’ or other `aspects’ of us that go beyond the physical DNA and the spiritual strands that Rita has described? If so, can Rita elaborate?”]
R: I won’t compare the two ways of describing the same reality, for a couple of reasons. One, most people will not have read that session or heard it, so it would require some explanation. But two, if you are describing the same reality, why compare systems? A rhetorical question, that: I understand the impulse, but I am saying it isn’t always profitable. It can be, if it results in the process of examining the two systems for common features so that you can see what they do not have in common. That’s how the guys always used to give us two very different analogies and tell us to strip off everything they didn’t have in common, so we could get closer to understanding things that couldn’t quite be said. But it can become unprofitable, even harmful, if it is used to try to “prove” or (more likely) “disprove” one system by testing it against the authority of another.
F: That requires some explanation, for I can imagine ways to use the process that can be quite helpful. Indeed, isn’t that what I have always done? Isn’t that what we do when we try to expand our knowledge-base? When the guys would tell us something, I always felt comforted if it seemed to agree with something Seth had said, for instance. I had only read a couple of the Seth books, but I take Seth as the gold standard for this type of information. If we don’t judge something new against what we have come to trust, where is our place to stand? Don’t we wind up continually trying to start fresh? And, in fact rather than theory, doesn’t that wind up in our not really comparing at all, but merely sticking to what we know rather than risking losing what firm ground we already have or think we have or hope we have?
R: Well, I said it can be helpful. My point is merely that it has its pitfalls like any procedure, and should be used with care.
F: An analogy had come to mind but I lost it.
R: Comparative religions.
F: Yes, that’s it. If you compare religions you can see their points in common and their distinctive points of emphasis. But if you compare them from within one system, taking that system as the touchstone, all you do is – at best – get a new slant on what you believe; you are unlikely to see the other systems as their adherents do.
R: Let’s look at that, and then we can proceed to the specific question of the day.
It is a mistake to judge other people’s (or even one’s own) system as relatively “good” or “bad” vis a vis another system. There is no perfect system any more than there is a perfect human (in the sense of all advantage and no consequent disadvantage). Every advantage is purchased at the expense of inherent disadvantage. We used to say that a thing had the defects of its qualities: That means, merely, that different specializations that make a thing better for one thing make it correspondingly worse for another thing.
F: I’m getting the vague impression of a bow and arrow versus a rifle or shotgun.
R: That’s right, but we could use any example. A bow and arrow is silent but doesn’t have the range or rapidity of a gunpowder-propelled missile. In some situations the silence is an advantage worth more than the disadvantage; in some, not.
F: Side note – what a quiet joy to look out the window as I sit here writing and see the sunrise, the line of red against the trees in the distance, reaching up into white and then deepening blue, after four years without a window looking out at a sunrise. It’s as it was those years living in your house, Rita, only now with Pantops [mountain] as part of the horizon.
R: And, as I said here once, I think, we get to experience that sunrise in a different sense, for here the physical phenomenon mingles seamlessly with the perceptions and reactions of the window through which we are seeing it.
F: Window, meaning me, in this case.
R: That’s right. We have no eyes because we have no limitations to the senses [which I took to mean, in the non-3D we are not limited to input from the senses], so in a way it cannot be said that we “see” a sunrise. And yet we do, in the same way that a psychic who “knows” something has a more direct link that one who has a vision or an idea that then needs to be interpreted. In short, we go directly to the sunrise as a combination of aesthetic experience and as trigger of your emotional and other associations – your years on Roberts Mountain Road, for instance – and do not have to do the work of association that you have already done, because you have already done it.
F: We’re working a little more slowly than usual, today. Here it is 6:45 and we’ve filled only five and a half journal pages instead of the usual seven or so [that we fill in 45 minutes].
R: Well, if you will waste time looking at sunrises —
F: Put it that way, we’re lucky to have anything at all, I suppose. Are we ever going to address that second question?
R: Right now. Are there energies that affect compound beings beyond the physical ones that are more easily discerned and described? Of course there are, and indeed I can elaborate, but so can your entire lives, and that is one way you should use your lives, as elaborations of meaning. What you have lived, you can know. Nothing else. That is not the limitation it may seem to be, however, as you all live much more than you will ever have time and awareness enough to explore.
A more direct answer is this. Remember in these explorations, always, as best you can, that everything is one. Everything is connected, and nothing exists in isolation. Therefore, if spiritual influences exists (and they do), then they must be connected to physical influences and both to you. How else could it be? Thus you as compound beings are animal and spirit, if you wish to divide things that way, or are meeting-places of physical strands (heredity) and life-strands (your spiritual heredity, call it, or “past lives,” or aspects) – and this compound being that you are is continually influenced by its environment, physical, spiritual, energetic – however you want to describe it (or rather, conceptualize it). That, after all, is why you are in physical existence, to be influenced by such factors and react to those influences. That is your function, and your predicament, and your achievement, and your joy. Your joy, if you allow it, for that depends upon your reactions. Some people rejoice in the beauty and promise of a sunrise; some grumble that the newly returning light makes it harder to keep sleeping. It is all in your reactions. And that’s enough for the moment.
F: Thanks as always, Rita. Before I go upstairs to type this up, I think I’ll give us both a few minutes to enjoy the rest of the sunrise.
R: Yes – except you realize, “the rest” of a sunrise is the entire day, including sunset and the night to come. It’s all one thing.
F: I do see that. Okay, till later.
Thanks Frank. So the answer to the first part, which was not intended to be a comparative, is that the “aspects” addressed in #29 is a way of addressing the same reality as the “strands” are intended to. Actually I can see them as two different points of view which is helpful at understanding the same subject.
I’m not sure that Rita answered the other question, which was is there a third category of energy beyond the physical and spiritual that flows through us. Nevertheless, as Rita stated, “…and this compound being that you are is continually influenced by its environment, physical, spiritual, energetic – however you want to describe it (or rather, conceptualize it).”