Rita — imagining the non-3D

Sunday, February 28, 2016
F: 4:55 a.m. All right, Rita. Shall we?
R: I think you will find that you feel better as we proceed.
F: I usually do, that’s why I am not begging off. Paying attention to something other than the body seems to smooth things out, at least for me. And, as we both know, that has been the story of my life.
R: Challenging and yet perhaps making possible what otherwise would not have been possible.
F: Oh, I know. It occurred to me long ago. So, the ex-3D soul.
R: Beginning your conscious life after 3D is a process of continuous redefinition, as I have said. Remember, I am not ascribing a sequence, nor a definite path, only a generalized rule of thumb.

F: Individual mileage may vary.
R: Will vary. But remember that. In these kinds of discussions, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that one is doing one of two things, and in either case mistake the description for a set of rigid rules. Either one is describing one’s own experience, or one attempts to generalize the path taken by the majority. Neither kind of description tells The Way It Is, only “a way it often is,” or even “the way it may be, more or less, in a lot of cases.” You can see that putting it these latter ways loses the punch that people prefer.
F: No certainty.
R: No certainty, no stark binary logic.
F: Either On or Off, Right or Wrong, This or That.
R: That’s right. People like to know, and knowing implies definiteness and it implies concise description and clear-cut choice. It is less emotionally satisfying to have what you always called a close focus on fuzz.
F: It’s funny, though. Real life as you are describing it – hell, as we experience it – has a lot more freedom than it would it if were always a series of either / or situations.
R: We could spend a moment looking at that, though. In one sense, life is always a series of either / or situations. You turn or you don’t. You change speed or you don’t. You persevere or you don’t. But there are so many either / or situations, so continually, and your ability to choose again allows you to continually refine past choices, that in effect it isn’t binary at all. But in the context of any given decision (including the decision to not decide) it is going to be a choice between two.
F: I get what you were implying there. The choice might be to turn or not turn, but that ultimately might result in turning any number of degrees in any combination of directions, as smaller binary decisions at lighting speeds cumulate. I don’t think I need to spell that out more.
R: So, people attempting to master an abstract description find it easier to imagine a path, even a path with variation and choice, than they do an infinity of options amounting to freedom of action. It is that way particularly when they set out to absorb a description of an afterlife, with its total lack of sensory orientation.
F: I’m getting a sense of Bob Monroe’s descriptions in Far Journeys. There was a sort of up-in-the-air quality to them.
[A different “voice” than Rita’s] He had a choice, you see.
F: Bob?
B: You are going to have to overcome your nervousness if we’re going to chat.
F: You know why I’m nervous.
B: Indeed I do. Quoting Bob Monroe is one thing, asserting that you are talking to him directly is a horse of another color.
F: It sure is.
B: Well, there’s no need to make any such attribution. Just say you were talking to the guys, or to Rita, and let it go. As you’ve said many times, there’s no proving such things, and it isn’t important.
But Bob Monroe had a choice, as I was saying. He could present a picture of what Rita is calling the non-3D anchored from the non-3D end, or from the 3D end. He didn’t have Rita’s advantage, or yours, of being able to read the book he was in the process of writing! After you read Far Journeys, you had a broader view of things than you did beforehand, as for instance you did after you read the Seth material, and recognized things.
So if I described an afterlife made comprehensible to people whose definitions were of individuals “doing their thing,” only without the limitations of the body, certainly it was going to be distorted. But if I tried to write it from a viewpoint that regarded Earth life only as a unique very specialized experience, not particularly important to the vast rest of existence, that was to be expressed in a very different way.
It was a translation of a translation of a translation, and it had to be expressed in words to people who were not at all what they thought they were, but were very certain about it all. Of course there were going to be distortions. In fact it was going to be distortion more than description, because the people reading it wouldn’t have the background to understand what they needed to understand before they approached it.
F: Rita’s dilemma about A and B.
B: Isn’t it always? But print has one advantage over more transitory media – and perhaps film has even more, if the film is preserved and accessed – and that is that an unchanging record always has more to reveal as the person reading it, or viewing it, changes. You can’t have an unchanged chemical reaction, you see, if one of the elements is not a fixed element.
F: “Fixed element” isn’t quite right, I know, but I couldn’t find the right noun. Try again?
B: “Quality” would do, or “known commodity.” The idea of it is simply, no book is an unchanged and unchangeable item except when approached by an unchanged mind. Since nothing in your 3D world can remain unchanged, it means a good book or a good record of any type can appear different, will be different, will have more to offer, whenever you come to it. So if you write in a necessarily cryptic way, you encode meanings that may become obvious to people only when they become ready to recognize a new aspect of what they have seen before, maybe many times.
F: Just like scripture.
B: Well, may the lord preserve my writing from becoming scripture!
F: Said with a smile, I recognize.
B: But seriously, scripture may be used or abused, like everything in life. If fixed and made arbitrary, it’s one thing. If flexible and seen as guidance rather than legislation, it is quite another. So if people want to use Far Journeys as a guide and a hint, well and good. If they want to make it an authoritative and infallible description of the way it is, well, good luck. Bu even then, maybe it will serve to move them along to a better understanding at some point.
What Rita is doing, as she does so well, is building a bridge between your everyday life and the reality I could only hint at in Far Journeys. But I could hope that you will remember not to overlook the element of strangeness that necessarily enters in to any description, however carefully drawn, of circumstances so different as to be scarcely hinted at and certainly not definitively laid out for you.
F: In other words, we’re on our own as usual.
B: Would you expect anything else?
F: No, I suppose not. Well, thanks for this. Any more at this time, or do we go back to our usual sponsor?
B: I guess you’ll just have to see, won’t you?
F: Smiling. Thanks, Bob. Rita?
R: One of the things you’re going to have to get used to, and adjust to, is that the difference between Rita and Bob isn’t as absolute as it appeared when we were in 3D together. So although it is easier for you to think of us as separate, in the way we were, or [else] as part of one vast faceless conglomerate, only vaguely imagined, in fact a closer analogy would be the color spectrum, where one shades into another even though each is still distinguishable as itself, depending upon your definition.
F: We have been using shared threads as our analogy.
R: Yes, but any analogy used too long becomes – or may become – concretized, appearing less flexible and less ephemeral, in a sense, than it really is. It’s fine to use analogies to help give yourself something to grasp, only remember that they are analogies, meaning “like something, in some ways, seen from certain viewpoints.” Analogies are not descriptions, they are guides to your intuition.
F: All right, got it.
R: You have it for the moment. The problem is, it is very easy to lose again. Mental processes have their own inertias, just like bodies. But notice the word “like”!
And that will have to do for this morning.
F: All right, Rita. Always enlightening. And thanks, Bob, as well. [slight pause] I sense you chuckling, Rita. What’s so funny?
R: He isn’t used to getting second billing.
F: That makes me laugh. Till next time, then.