New Rita communication — starting a new model

Thursday, February 11, 2016
7:50 a.m. Lying down in bed, sleeping late, a sudden thought like cutting through fog, and I thought, “Miss Rita, ready for me to get back to work?” So here I am. I have almost forgotten the thought – it was a realization that the spatial analogy is still intertwined with my ideas about mind.
So I guess we’ll see, as soon as I get some coffee.
F: Okay. Rita?
R: Your layoff seems to you to have lasted a long time, but not so long, really. One thing interruptions do is sever the day-to-day connection of thought. At some point maybe we will go into that. There is value and disadvantage, both, to continuity and to discontinuity, as to everything else in life.
F: I guess. But, this morning’s thought? Or, no, I have to remember to let this go where it wants to go. Interruptions also stop us from forcing things, don’t they?

R: Sometimes. And you have it, right there. That’s what I was just saying. Between the lines, or behind the scenes, or however you want to put it, your own individual part of the enterprise tends to take over and say, “Okay, I’ve got this, I’ll drive, I know what I’m doing now.” And in some circumstances that is good, and helpful, and in some, not. It isn’t so good for changing direction unexpectedly or for exploring new terrain in new ways.
F: I suppose it’s the thing about beginner’s mind, being empty, as opposed to expert’s mind, being too full to easily change course. Tortured metaphor, but you know what I mean.
R: You are on the right track. The division of labor between the two makes for flexibility and also for persistence. Imbalance tends to make things harder to accomplish. Of course at any given moment, one or the other tendency will predominate, but that is not imbalance, but alternation.
Now, to begin. You were awakened with a realization that the spatial analogy has snuck in to distort – or anyway to shape – your understanding of the nature of the individual mind and the joint mind and the larger being, etc.
F: And I get strongly that this is why I was led to pick up my copy of Asimov’s Foundation and Earth, and put it down as contrived and wordy and uninteresting – but only after his use of “I/we/Gaia” had registered.
R: Go ahead, vent, although not at length, and we can continue.
F: Smiling, but I will. I have always conceded that Asimov is an interesting writer, though he never quite plays fair with the reader, but instead seems determined to display how clever he is. And, worse, he is or was so immersed in materialism when he wrote the initial Foundation series, it is irritating. He was apparently tone-deaf to any connection between human intelligence and anything that could be considered non-rational. What we are doing right here, for instance. You never see him give a good word to religion except, at best, as crowd control. He is or was full of himself and, by proxy, full of human knowledge and the power of rationality. If he ever understood anything Jung said, for instance, I see no sign of it. It is irritating that – with all that being true – he is or was nonetheless usually interesting and stimulating.
R: Feeling better now?
F: Smiling still. You were on the receiving end of more than one rant, I suppose, though I don’t know that I realized it at the time.
R: It was always interesting, if not always persuasive.
F: I’m sure. So–?
R: The concept “I/we/Gaia” – describe the necessity in a few words.
F: His postulate was an entire planet that was one united, interconnected consciousness rather like our concept of the underlying unity of all mind except in his case the humans were fully aware of it and lived in an unbroken sense of their individuality as part of their belonging to a larger consciousness. I don’t have that quite right, I can feel it, but it will give you what you need, hopefully.
R: I think so. So, if we take me, while I was in body I was “I (Rita) / TGU / All-That-Is.”
F: Hmm, I see it. A sort of expansion of Asimov’s concept beyond the physical.
R: That’s right. His thinking was always materialistic but didn’t quite appear so because of people’s habit of thinking mind non-physical. Or, rather, their habit of configuring life as physical versus non-physical (“the other side”) rather than individual pole / group pole – and of course that isn’t the end of it.
F: No, I’m beginning to see it. We’re not there yet, in terms of putting this clearly, are we? Is that because I’m out of practice?
R: It is because you are out of your accustomed comfort zone. I don’t mean emotionally, I mean intellectually. This is always going to be a problem, for anybody except trance mediums. To move into new territory, you must somewhat suspend what you think you know, and, especially, what models you have found useful to that point. But you can’t (and therefore shouldn’t try to) discard everything, because that is what brought you to the new threshold. You have to hold it lightly, and the balance is going to be delicate. So your first new steps are usually, if not always, going to be halting and contradictory, and sometimes seemingly nonsensical and even meaningless, and all you can do is persevere and see if it winds up making sense.
F: I got – while writing that out – the analogy about orange, red, and yellow.
R: It is a useful one. Until you experience the reality of the color orange, you may – if all you know is red and yellow – be unable to comprehend orange as a concept. How can a color be red and yet not red; yellow but also not-yellow? It won’t make sense, and your initial experience of orange may appear to be a distortion of red or yellow. You may chalk it off as distortion, bad perception, cloudiness. That’s why it is always important to give these things time to prove themselves one way or the other.
So, now, today’s starting-point. There is “I” and that is Rita as I experienced and crated her. An individual in the world, living a life of mixed continual consciousness, unconsciousness (which is a concept we will have to look at, another time), and, eventually, what we might call a consciousness of self as well as of the external world. (This is going to take a lot of explanation!)
There is “TGU”, which is how you and I learned to think of it, but which I experienced long before as Guidance. That is, perception and guidance from outside or beyond the conscious self that propelled me through the everyday.
And there is “All That Is”, which some might think of as the living equivalent of the Akashic Record, or others as the Heavens culminating in God, or, well – everything.
We in bodies are those three things because they are not three things individually but one thing in three aspects. But they aren’t always equally noticeable, put it that way.
Now, about the interference of the spatial analogy, and that will be enough for this morning. You can see that it –
No, let’s begin that again.
You come up with very different models, depending upon which assumptions you begin from. The various models will each have their weak and strong points, their illustrative and their deceptive or misleading aspects.
One model begins with the individual in the body. Now, we have devoted quite a bit of time to explain that the individual isn’t a unit at all, but is a community and part of larger and smaller communities. This has been a good way to loosen the constricting idea that is always seeming to force conflict between self and other, or between self as experienced in one lifetime, and its predecessor or successor life, as if I continues as a unit. (In one sense, by the way, it does, but we are a way from explaining that yet.)
We are now beginning another model, going over the same terrain – your experience of life (physical, emotional, mental) as it may be alternately understood in order to shed light by implicit comparison. This model does not begin with the individual even as so modified in concept, but with the totality of being.
F: Oh, only that?
R: Well, you can see that beginning there might easily have left us in Cloud Cuckoo-Land or at best in ungrounded speculation. But as an alternative model – which means, keeping other, previous modes in mind — it will be quite helpful.
F: When you put it that way, I can see that a layoff may have been necessary. Okay, good. I’m glad to be back in harness and I’ll hope you are ready and I am ready to go back to doing this regularly.
R: In a Free-Will Universe, I guess we’ll have to see, won’t we?
F: Till next time, then, and thanks.