Rita on the TMI Explorers program

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

F: 5 a.m. Good morning, Miss Rita. Shall we continue down the list?

R: Let’s answer Al [Dahlberg]’s questions about the future of TMI.

F: All right. Between us, I’d like to know if you and Bob [Monroe] are consulting, just as I would like to know your continuing relationship, but I think that would be a touchy subject [among others here in 3D] – Frank purporting to bring through Bob or reports of Bob – and I can see that it would make the Monroe family nervous, and I can see why it would. I have the same reaction myself when I read other people’s unverifiable claims. But it is something we’re going to have to learn to live with, I just don’t know how yet. So, let’s stick to Al’s questions for the moment.

[Albert Dahlberg:
[We are starting up the Explorers program at TMI again. Does she have any suggestions as to the direction it should be going?]

R: I am in contact with those involved in the program anyway, whether or not they are aware of it, or believe what they sense, and this is not an unusual thing. So is Bob, so are others in our continuing enterprise, in the same and very real way that, say, Steve Jobs continues to be a part of Apple, or Abraham Lincoln continues to concern himself with the United States or Charles de Gaulle with France. This is a topic that will be of some interest, and when we fill in a few more necessary ideas, we’ll discuss it, for the on-going involvement of the non-3D with the 3D is a major theme that has been lost sight of [by contemporary culture]. In the absence of an understanding of that continuing interaction, a good deal of the meaning of life has gone out the window.

F: Well that ought to get Charles’ attention. It has mine.

R: Stay tuned. But actually I bring that up not so much as a preview of coming attractions as of an intrinsic part of the logic of my suggestions for TMI’s program. The times have rolled on. It is time for more mature understandings and for larger steps in a more advanced context.

F: I think I know where you are going with this.

R: You should. You are living it. It is the difference between first steps and continuity.

F: It’s odd.

[Interruption, as the power flickers , causing the UPC system to squeal upstairs, requiring me to go reset it.]

F: It’s odd, the resistance I’m having to fight.

R: That is the resistance of the reaction of others, and your reaction to their reaction.

F: But it hasn’t happened yet.

R: So?

F: Hmm. Okay, so the difference between taking first steps and then moving beyond that?

R: The Explorers program was a good confidence-builder, look at it that way. Bob had given us this new tool set and had given us ideas how to use it, and in return we had furnished him with a supportive community that reduced his isolation. Those relationships make up a story in itself, for another time. But for now the point is that we set out to see what we could see. We didn’t have to prove that it wasn’t fakery, and we were aware that some of it would be self-delusion occasionally, or the working-out of someone’s personal problems, but that wasn’t a problem given that we could look at it as part of an on-going demonstration of the inter-relation of things. So, for those few years, we accumulated a great deal of experiential reporting and a certain amount of – what should we call it? – provisional explanation, let’s say. The sheer matter-of-factness of it, the repeatability, the taken-for-granted access, was itself ground-breaking for its day.

But it was not followed up by analysis or even systematic transcription and recording in print. And so to some extent it was writing on water, clarity achieved and forgotten almost in the same breath, so to speak. I told you how we would sometimes get exciting information in a session, but then when we tried to play it back to Bob and the others [in the New Land community] in our living room [during their Sunday gatherings], it didn’t come across as exciting, but as pedestrian and even boring.

F: You said, here, not then, that it was because the temporary joint mind allowed you vistas while it was in operation that were not there when you played back the recording later.

R: That’s right, and that’s the challenge, you see.

F: Well, — I don’t see, not quite.

R: The Explorers program can offer many things, can go off in several directions, and the more the different priorities overlap, the better.

There is access to information, which itself may be subdivided many ways.
There is access to the ability to access information.
There is demonstration of new possibility.
And there is the creation of new possibilities by the creation of 3D support-systems.

To take them in order:

Access to information is what first comes to people’s minds. It is the bait on the hook.

F: It is the fish at the bottom of the sea, trying to imagine the man on top of a hill watching television.

R: Not quite. The “tying to imagine,” the wanting to imagine, is the bait and the hook, you see.

F: Yes, I think I do see. That curiosity is what the non-3D part of ourselves uses to get and hold our attention.

R: Not quite, but more or less. The explorers could profitably set out research goals for those interested in pursuing them. Not for the purposes of verification, but for initial map-making, you see. In other words, explorers are not to be expected to make maps, but to mark out experiences for later map-making by themselves or others. “I see a couple of mountains and a river running between them” isn’t much for a finished map but it may furnish a basis for comparison with other reports that together can be used to construct maps, you see. In short, don’t confuse functions. You send explorers out to experience. If they have the proper skill-sets (and no reason why you couldn’t try to provide those skill-sets by training), they may do more than merely experiencing, but experiencing is their job. Analysis and synthesis is an entirely different function, equally necessary but unlikely to be done by the same people or at the same time.

Training – teaching people not only to do the exploring but to do it increasingly more professionally, more sophisticatedly in technique – is a function quite as important as recording and interpreting anything they may bring back. In other words, the explorer may have been sent off to see what Kentucky looks like, and that information may in itself be valuable, but in the process of living the exploring, he or she is going to acquire and hone the skills needed to live safely and comfortably in the wilderness. This acclimatization, this new comfort in what were strange surroundings, is itself a goal. You will be creating a corps of explorers able to go farther, and to support each other, and to change the culture they came out of, just by their existence.

F: Sounds like creating the equivalent of the mountain men of the 1800s.

R: Sometimes what someone was becomes more important as time goes on than it was in actual fact. In other words, myths acquire formative power. But this is a side-trail.

Demonstration doesn’t mean getting the culture’s attention, for the sake of trying to “prove” that certain abilities exist. Either people will see, or they won’t. Either they will act on what they see, or they won’t. That isn’t of particular concern here. What is of concern is demonstration within the community. This already takes place de facto; it is a major accomplishment of 30 years of programs [at TMI] – but it should now be addressed more systematically.

F: Care to say more on that?

R: It ties in with the fourth goal, the creation of support-systems. Take a moment, here.

F: Yes. I am feeling tired from this, don’t know why.

R: Rest a minute. Drink your coffee, listen to the rain.

[pause]

F: I was getting a little wound-up, wasn’t I? Why?

R: This is an unusual session, combining input and unconscious analysis, call it that. But we can go into it another time. Let’s move on with this.

F: Okay.

R: By demonstration and support I mean using the TMI community as a community in the way it functions among program participants during a program, but wider and on a continuing basis.

F: More like the healing program whose name (ridiculously enough) is escaping me at the moment. Oh, the Dolphin Energy Club?

R: Like it in terms of joint endeavor and on-going membership, but unlike it in terms of the tasks it would aim at. And this requires really more than we have time to give it today.

F: I can push on a while longer.

R: No, it would be better to continue at some length, rather than give it cursory treatment at the tag-end of this session.

F: All right, well, I thank you and I’m sure Al and TMI thank you too. And I get that you have something else to say.

R: Only that this topic is important and not yet fully addressed, and so I hope people will pay it special attention.

F: All right. Till next time.