Rita: We’re still individuals!

Sunday, July 2, 2017

5:40 a.m. All right, Miss Rita. We all experience the 3D world differently. Does that mean we experience All-D differently too? Are we going to be looking at how much is common to us all and how much is individual? On second thought, cancel that question. Your move.

That isn’t a bad way to approach the larger subject, and remember – meant for all who read this, not only you as an individual – you never know, really, how much of any impulse is “you” and how much is from another source flowing though you. It may be harder to say something “irrelevant” than you think!

What stuck out, for me, was “you” and “another.”

That’s right, and probably we should clear that bit of shrubbery, as you put it. We tend to distinguish between ourselves (whatever level of generalization that may encompass) and “other.” It’s natural, but it is so ubiquitous that perhaps it would be as well to spell it out. “We” may mean anything from one person, to a family, to a group of whatever nature, to a country, to humanity as opposed to aliens, say. The key to the definition is the opposition of self and other.

Perhaps there isn’t any practical alternative to this habit, if one is to make sense of the world. Even those who arrive at “all is one” continue to divide the world. They don’t eat their neighbor’s dinner, and they prefer that their neighbor doesn’t eat theirs. But if the self v. other idea is so universal, because it makes sense of the world, still it manifests differently in different circumstances. It isn’t a “bad” thing or a “good” thing; it is a fact of life. This may come as a shock, or may appear obvious: The situation isn’t all that different in the All-D.

I remind our readers that we came up with that term to describe the 3D world plus the non-3D world – in other words, everything as experienced beyond sensory limitations.

Yes, and we should add to that reminder another, reminding them, and you, that all definitions are provisional and subject to change as truth reveals itself in different aspects.

Okay.

The primary difference between our turf beyond the 3D world and yours, is the conditions set up by 3D limitations. I am using terms you have used many times.

The very word “turf” brings me back to one of the first communications I get from TGU.

Or was it perhaps from your All-D self, which has the advantage of skipping along through time, and knew what you would be needing?

Interesting thought. I don’t usually remember that I’m only looking at things sequentially, as if the other side, as we used to call it, was bound by the same limitations. But, to return –

Thinking of – or, to be more precise, experiencing – self v. other is not confined to the 3D part of the world. Generalization

Went wool-gathering, remembering a movie I watched last night. Sorry.

We [in the non-3D] are not confined by bodies. We are not pinned to one moving moment of time. So of course to that degree we are freer in our definitions. It is easier to remember the entire play and not only any one act or scene (or, in extreme circumstances, any one line). But that doesn’t mean we are without identity. Separate and not separate. We cluster by the nature of what we are.

I get the sense of it, but we haven’t yet quite said it, I think. Do you mean, in non-3D our essences remain different even as our bodies here fall away?

So the differences among us are more essential and less superficial, yes. It’s hard to have upon-the-surface when you don’t have a surface. [“Superficial,” of course, is derived from the Latin for “upon the surface.”] So skin color, age, gender, class, nationality fall away in appearance and in day-to-day (so to speak) continuity. But they left their mark, didn’t they? They went into the shaping of who you were, didn’t they? So how can they, or rather their effects, cease to exist? The only thing is, each given life coexists with others, so opposites tend to damp down.

I know I garbled that one!

Not too much. The point is that when one comprises many lives, extremism tends to diminish. How can you be racist, sexist, ageist, classist, etc. when your larger being comprises others on the opposite side of whatever polarity you would tend to set up?

Okay, but the individual – this is going to take some spelling out.

Of course it is, but who better to do it than us, as opposed to those others?

All right, I’m smiling. Go ahead.

The difficulty you see will actually start to clear up some things, once we clear it up. You want to state it?

The difficulty I see is not the concept itself, but the process of describing it.

Well, go ahead.

Take me as an example, and take the facts I think I know as if they are really established. There’s Frank, born in mid-twentieth century America. He has his values, opinions, prejudices, dislikes, ideals, failings. He is, in short, a person. He drops the body, and does not cease to be what he was, only he realizes that he was always more than he realized, at the same time. So now he realizes he is still Frank, but Frank is a small franchise or let’s say local branch of a vast firm that includes, say, an English monk of the middle ages, a restless Virginian of the 1700s, an Egyptian priest from far pre-history, another restless American from the 1800s, an Englishman from the 19th and 20th century, a Polish-Jewish girl who died at age eight in a Nazi camp, a woman who led a placid life on the frontier, and on and on. Each of these has its own set of values, etc. That is what made them them. That is what they incarnated to shape and preserve.

So if somebody contacts “Frank” in the other world, they may get someone who closely resembles the Frank they knew or knew of, or they might get a Frank pretty different from what they expected. The determining factor will be where they struck along a line of continuity between Frank as individual and Frank as part of a larger being.

And if they strike you as individual, it is like someone at Monroe doing a retrieval, dealing with a soul as if the soul existed in isolation. But if they strike you as part of your greater connected being, they may get something unaccountable to them, given their expectations. Correct as far as it goes, only resist the temptation to come to too firm a conclusion on any of it.

But that does state the difficulty. Now, remember to refer our discussion to the question of “What do they do over there.” It’s a long twisty trail to get there, but the very first step is to realize that the very individuality you came into 3D to forge is not going to be thrown away upon completion of the task! And that means, “us v. others” is going to remain. It doesn’t have to be antagonism, though it can be, but differences remain, and not as an unfortunate side-effect but as an integral fact of life.

It doesn’t feel like  we’ve gotten very far, and yet I’m seeing the yellow flag, or maybe the red one.

It’s just as well to keep points crisp and short. You aren’t the only one who gets fatigued; think of your readers.

If you say so. I note that today is an anniversary.

Yes, Hemingway in 1961. If Hemingway were not to retain the marvelous complexity that he achieved in 3D life, what good would that life do us here? That is a rhetorical question, and may serve as a place to pause.

Okay. Thanks as always, Rita.