Rita on wrestling and on crystallization

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

3 a.m. I have just skimmed the material we have received since June 30, and it’s a little bit frustrating that I find I cannot keep it all in mind simultaneously. Never can.

That’s the purpose of memory and of writing, in the 3D. Outside of 3D constrictions, you don’t have the same problem. That’s the need for oral memory and written memory in 3D. By absorbing individual bits and pieces, you can climb to higher levels of understanding, but you can only do that by absorbing, not by merely reading or memorizing or summarizing.

As you and I did when we spent week after week questioning the guys about the nature of things. As Seth’s “Class” that Jane Roberts held. As, I suppose, “A Course in Miracles” classes do.

Yes provided you are wrestling with the material, not merely accepting it as Gospel. It is in wrestling with it, questioning, testing, holding it up to your own experiences and concepts, that you make it part of you. Until then, you are merely a tourist.

”Tourist” in the sense of being exposed to a concept but not really allowing yourself the possibility of being changed by it.

As you absorb new concepts into your being, you change what you bring to the next encounter. It is that new changed “you” that absorbs the new increment. The equation is subtly changed each time by differences in the “you” you bring to the discussion.

So, little by little.

Life is sometimes revolution, sometimes incremental evolution. They work together. But by the nature of things, revolutionary upheavals are relatively rarer than evolutionary, incremental, changes.

All right. Would you care to deal with a question?

Proceed.

This was left on my blog by someone using the name “Subtle traveler.”

[ST: Now that some past gaps are being filled (even going back to original TGU content), can you ask Rita to expand upon the meaning or definition of TGU’s term “crystallization”? (Excuse my 3D thinking in framing my question.) With the expanded discussion of Sam’s Life A (and Life A1 to A1000) today (July 10), I sense that “crystallization” would take on much more meaning for those of us dealing with this and other original TGU concepts.]

[Rita:] You saw the same dawning of comprehension in yourself yesterday as I said what I did.

Yes. You said “coalesces (or doesn’t)” and I did think of the old concept I had had firmly but vaguely, and I thought “aha, so that’s what that meant!” You and I wrestled with that, back when you and I were quizzing the guys, and I for one never quite had a satisfactory handle on it. Strange feeling, actually. I was pretty sure, and at the same time it didn’t quite make sense.

And now it does. Why?

Oh, I know why, because now we are looking at it from the point of view of the larger being instead of from the view of what we are thinking of – or were thinking of – as disconnected fragments.

Perspective puts things into a relationship, but any one perspective is limiting and (if confused for ultimate truth) misleading.

As I remember it, we were looking at it as the larger being assembling a group of elements into a life, and if at the end of that life the product wasn’t sufficiently worthwhile to keep, the elements dissolved back into the mixture. They kept assuring you, nothing lost, nothing to mourn, but it seemed to us a little bit callous, perhaps a little judgmental.

Looks a little different now?

It does. Today we would say, I guess, that a Sam creates Life A320, and Life A320 doesn’t particularly add any–. No, as soon as I try to wrap words around it, I get lost. Over to you.

You are getting tangled up with Purpose again. As soon as you try to fit an understanding into a concept, you are in for trouble.

Productive trouble?

Sometimes. It is one way in which you may wrestle with the material. But you can lose that wrestling match, you know. Nothing final about that, just a way of reminding you that not every encounter is going to result in obvious progress..

So, reframe it for us?

Any given life may be regarded as an episode in a TV series, or as a day in a life, say. Not every episode is memorable. Not every day is important in and of itself. (The living of it is important, because the living itself is undivided, but what flows from that particular day may be nothing in particular.) If you concentrate on such a day, you may conclude that nothing happened. It isn’t a model for anything further – or perhaps we could say it is an invisible model.

Invisible, as in transparent?

Yes. Suppose Monday is a significant day in your life for some reason. Tuesday, Wednesday, nothing much happens. You still need to proceed through Tuesday and Wednesday if you are to get to Thursday. Imperfect analogy, but perhaps suggestive. You remember Monday, you perhaps don’t even remember the next two days, but you did live them.

In 2001-2, we would have said that Monday crystallized as a template for other lives, and Tuesday and Wednesday didn’t. Only, then we were thinking of Tuesday and Wednesday being discarded, because we were thinking in terms of them as individuals more than as part of the whole.

That’s right. And it was something of an achievement to bring forth as much as we did. It was in wrestling with the material that we got even as far as we did.

And if we had continued to wrestle with it, we might have come to this?

Think how much material we have had to get through, in the past two and a half years, to get to the more unified concept that brought you to the reframing. Some things take as long as they take, as you say.

I suppose that means that we are getting somewhere. Okay, I’m ready to wrap it up for now unless you have more. Thanks for all this, as usual. (3:40)