Seventh talk with Rita – 12-14-2014

Sunday, December 14, 2014

F: 6:15 a.m. Miss Rita, our friend Charles Sides emailed me some questions, which I will re-read to stir up your tea leaves, and then hope for answers to one or more of them. As always, I am leaving myself open to the possibility that the questions were planted – in this case by Charles, or upstairs through Charles. And as I phrase that, I see again that it is going to require some mental refashioning if I am to get beyond the language – TGU and all – I have been using for more than twenty years. Not complaining, just noting. I realize that you can’t sail to new places by remaining in sight of the place you started.

[Charles’ email:] Cindi Dale says there are vibrational levels where one rests, reviews, heals, seeks knowledge and then the wisdom to share. These are what she calls the first Five Planes after one dies. Then she describes seven “higher” planes where a “soul” goes about “life” after death. You see, I would be curious to know what Rita experienced. Did she review her life? Did she go back and “relive” any moments experiencing them from the perspective of others involved? Is there time? What does she do? Where is she? What about reincarnation? Is she thinking about it? Who or what comes back?

F: For the record, I don’t know who Cindi Dale is. Someone Charles is reading or has read, presumably.

R: Those are two different sets of questions. The first asks theory, the second asks experience. Or rather, that is how the answers would sort out.

Bear in mind that the term “vibrational levels” is a concept formed by taking a higher-dimensional reality and forcing it into sequential 3D experience. It is unavoidable, but it is necessary that you remember that it is analogy. Everything you can be told is a translation. Thus, the spatial analogy sneaks in – as you and I were told in our sessions – and makes it seem as though one would have to go through territory A, B, C, and D to get to E. As you will remember, TMI participants tended to think in the same way about Focus levels, as though Focus 21 could be reached only by traversing levels 10, 12, and 15.

F: I well remember when I thought that way myself. The numbers seemed to make it obvious Only with experience did it become clearer that it wasn’t sequential unless you conceptualized it that way.

R: Bob [Monroe] did try to undercut that assumption by introducing the one-breath technique, but perhaps he didn’t want to rearrange people’s concepts too much, given that what he had given them was so useful for practical exploration.

In any case, Charles quotes this woman as describing these states of acceptance as if they were sequentially laid out, as if they were stops on a railroad line. A better analogy would be short hops by airplane, with the destination depending more on the intent of the pilot than upon a necessary traversing of terrain. Not everybody touches on each of these stops; not everybody touches on them in the same order.

A continuing source of confusion in these matters is the question of who we’re talking about, for this is something as misperceived as focus levels. Are we talking about the personality-essence that was formed in that lifetime and has just emerged into what is to it new life? Or are we talking about the underlying continuity from which the personality was formed? And that will take some examining.

F: I imagine so. and some definition (and yes, I will bear in mind that all definitions are provisional).

R: The safest way to go about this is to recapitulate what you yourself were told long ago. It will be new to some, and it will develop into new concepts.

Souls come into existence; or, they have existed since the beginning of time. It depends on how you look at it.

Think about that, for a moment, don’t just breeze past it. New souls exist, or all souls are equally eternal on both ends (that is, they have no beginning as well as no end). Both ways of seeing it more or less true, neither way truer than the other. How can that be?

F: This seems to me to go well with Peter Novak’s scheme in The Division of Consciousness: people are conscious and unconscious minds, inhabiting the same body, either separating at death or, more rarely, continuing, and this duality caused mankind’s two opinions of the afterlife, reincarnation or judgment followed by heaven or hell. What you see depends on what you focus on. [Rather than conscious and unconscious minds, I should have said spirit and soul, but I won’t go into that, as Peter’s book is not the focus but merely a by-product of the theme.]

R: The analogy with Peter Novak’s scheme holds in so far as us discussing changing points of view. It does not hold otherwise, given that his starting-point is the individual and mine is the larger community of which the individual is one part. This will become clearer as we progress. The key to this work of perception and analysis is the willingness to hold two contradictory views provisionally – not with the intent of eventually deciding between them, but with the intent of seeing a higher level at which they can be reconciled as partial views each with its own validity. And of course “higher level” – and any other way to say it that you could think of – brings in the spatial analogy. It can’t be helped, only noticed, just as the sequential nature of writing cannot be helped, only kept in mind as an inherent distortion.,

We keep coming back to this fact: If you examine a net, it will appear to be one consistent unit when examined at one level, and a series of knots, at another, and even may appear to be a confusion of knots and spaces and strands, when seen at another level. And of course if the net is examined folded over itself, or full of fishes –

Existence is a net. I didn’t say physical existence, for as I said what you call and think of as the non-physical is a part of the one inseparable reality. That net is alive, and the strands and knots are not more or less alive than the spaces, which, after all, are only nothingness when seen from the view that sees strands and knots and cannot see what shares the overall form.

F: Ether, holding together the heavens. A similar example.

R: Not so much holding together as comprising, but yes, not a bad analogy. Materialist science looks between planets and sees empty space, or did until recently. The medievals envisioned the planets connected by a matrix they called aether, or the heavens. Invisible to one way of looking, obvious to another. So, similarly, the question of what the world is. Take the knots to be analogous to what you see as individuals. Examine a knot and you see that it is not actually a thing in itself, but an intersection of strands. Or, examine a strand and you will see it as nowhere an independent element, but is inextricably bound to other strands by way of knots, or it could not be part of a net. And, examine the net as a whole (assuming we could envision the whole) and you will see that it is a holder of pattern, that it holds strands and knots in a particular way so as to involve what appears to be space; it binds the three elements that are in fact one element – it all depends on what you examine, how you focus, and what your mental concepts allow you to see.

But of course, like anything else I can say, it is only an analogy. Its use is to remind you and others that concentrating on “the nature of the afterlife” – or “the nature and meaning of life,” for that matter – produce answers geared to the focus you bring to the question. If you remain fixated on the individual – as if a net were only knots, and no strands and patterns and spacing – you are going to get a different picture than if you examine the individual knowing, holding in mind, that this is only one way of seeing a more complex reality.

When you have a microscope and a slide being examined, what you see will depend upon how you focus the lens. What disappears in a given focus does not cease to exist, it only disappears from view. The trick is to refocus, remembering.

F: This [about alternating focus] is very much what I got in the guys’ epilog to Muddy Tracks.

R: Should that surprise you?

F: I don’t know that it does surprise me. I’ve tried to look at things from more than one viewpoint for a long while now. But it has been over an hour, and I’m afraid we must quite before you’ve gotten more than just started – as usual.

R: Slow and steady wins the race.

F: Next time.