Rita on guidance as a process and on evil in All-D

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

7 a.m. Rita, I woke up with a thought on the nature of evil, but I forgot what it was, because as soon as I formulated a question to ask you, I got a pretty definite concept in mind. Guidance in play, I take it: immediate answers to questions.

Or you may choose to look at it as an example of you doing the work behind your own back. You think of a subject in a certain way, which poses or reveals a question. Then you go away, so to speak, doing other things. But the associating-machine continues to work the problem. Then, when you return to it, there is all the associated material ready for display. Magic.

And as I was writing that out, I was hearing, feeling, all the questions about your explanation: the question of who was directing the “association machine” when my conscious mind was elsewhere, who was presenting the result, who was drawing my attention back to the subject in the first place.

We can talk about the nature of consciousness as experienced in 3D, or we can set out your idea about evil.

Let’s pursue the nature of evil first. I know some people will think we’re beating a dead horse (which I’d rather do than beat a live one, and I expect the horse would agree), but if it interests me, presumably it interests others.

Then set out what came to you.

I won’t swear that it came to me just in this particular way, but what I am left with is that evil is an inescapable result of perceived separation. Push evil to its roots and you see, “I want to do this because I want to do it, and I do not care who it hurts.” This even includes the situation of wanting to hurt others for the sake of hurting others. Someone who was actively aware of the interconnection of all being would not be able to be quite so immune to other people’s pain.

As you often say to me, that requires some unpacking.

It does. But as I carried the bag, I am hoping that you will do the unpacking. (And I can hear you grumbling, “What am I, the maid?”) But, levity aside –

Perhaps you can see that one reason why people have been so perplexed and stymied by the problem of evil is because they confine their consideration to the manifestation of evil in the 3D world. “Why does God permit evil?” That question doesn’t specifically disconnect the 3D experience from the entire order of things, but it does so implicitly. It says, God – meaning not only the creator of the 3D world but the embodiment (though that is the wrong word) of all that is good – nevertheless allows or perhaps even insists upon evil being there to disrupt God’s creation. If they were thinking of one unbroken unity (rather than 3D by itself, or 3D versus heaven), they wouldn’t be face with that unsolved and insoluble mystery.

Genesis, the story of the Fall, all that, makes it pretty nearly inevitable that they would separate 3D from the rest of the world, doesn’t it?

Not at all. That is, not necessarily. But you need to be at a certain place to read it. From any lower perspective, yes, that is what it leads to. But looking at it from where we are now – which is an excellent reason to come back to the subject, you see – what do we have? For one thing, we have not been engaging in theological speculation. To the degree that we discuss God, it is God as creator of the world (that is, of this level of reality). What this reality says about God’s attributes is mostly speculation, and premature speculation.

In other words, we are saying “God the creator” in the way Bob [Monroe, in his book Far Journeys] said Someone. Not the unknowable ultimate, not the being that “must” have these or those attributes, only whoever created this reality that we know.

Surely that’s a big enough canvas, without pretending to explore the unknowable. What we are doing is unknowable enough! But you inch forward and maybe after a while what was unknowable becomes at least a little more thinkable. Only, reaching too far too fast is likely to leave you more perplexed – or more wrongly certain – than you were.

But after the work we have done already, surely the story of The Fall from Eden looks different. The Tree of the Perception of Things as Good and Evil, for one thing. Creation, then the “fall” into duality. An explanation of the roots of our existence. Unfortunate in that it tends to promote a sense of guilt, but helpful in that it tends to promote a sense of shared guilt, of de facto, rather than active, complicity with the evil that lives within us.

Hadn’t looked at it quite that way.

If you regard scripture not as a rulebook or a penal code or a science text but as a psychological instruction book couched in fable and myth rather than in “fact,” you will begin to see it as a valuable resource. And of course, the first thing people do is overvalue it (Gods v. worms) and then later, in reaction, de-value it, perhaps entirely.

Understood. Didn’t the guys say something similar, years ago?

Quite possibly. So, we have explained Evil as an inevitable effect of separation into shards of consciousness. Here’s the thing that may not have occurred to you. Sams are themselves shards. What the guys used to call amoebas are themselves shards. “Shard-ism” is not a phenomenon confined to the 3D portion of the world. All compound beings are shards, and how could it be otherwise?

Huh. And I get a sense of life as a continual process of re-knitting.

Yes. Remember how we were told that the formation of souls involves sometimes including actively hostile elements and living out the resulting conflicts? That is a form of re-knitting, preventing the world from splitting into irrevocable, logically unavoidable divisions.

Thus the importance of the 3D experience to the world.

One importance, anyway, yes.

Well, that is a different view of things. But why should all this division and reuniting be necessary?

You are asking one of the important questions that cannot necessarily be answered with any great confidence.

You mean you don’t know either?

Why should I not ask you the same question? You are as close to the answer as I am. We live in the same world, we share the same nature, we are in fact even part of the same Sam. If my consciousness now has different characteristics and limits than yours does (to the extent that your 3D level is aware of them), still we are vastly more alike than different. So – don’t you know?

It’s still so easy to fall into that idea of “the other side knows everything, and when I get there I’ll know everything too.” Hard to really remember, “I’m already on the other side, so called, and nobody knows everything.”

But, you’re getting used to it.

Like the old joke. (The fortune teller tells the guy that until he is 40 he will be poor and miserable. And then? Then you get used to it.)

Except, this isn’t getting used to being poor, it’s getting used to being rich, which has its own problems. But let us return once more to the point. Evil is an effect of people acting as if consequences to others do not matter. That’s all it is. Look at any movie, any novel, any history book, any psychology text, and you will see it spelled out in examples, regardless what theories may be spun.

I’m hearing an unspoken caveat that ought to be set out, the difference between evil and misfortune.

That confusion arises because language tends to describe external effect rather than internal process. Thus, if your cat gets run over by a car, and it is an accident, the effect is evil for those who love the cat; the intent is not evil, for there wasn’t any intend to run over the animal, it just happened. Similarly, if someone comes down with something incurable, some may think it was evil in the world that such things can happen, but again (unless you think the illness followed someone’s directed intent), there was no intent. But if you keep the difference clear in your mind between intent and effect, the rest will be clear. No one does evil without intent, even though “evil” results may follow.

Perhaps next time we can explore how evil intent manifests among non-3D dwellers.

Perhaps we can.

Thanks as ever.