Awakening from the 3D World, an introduction

The following is the Introduction to Awakening from the 3D World. This, in a few words, is my attempt to tell you how the book came about, why it is worth reading, and what’s in it for you. As I point out, this book can change your life.

Introduction

Anyone who does any serious exploring into the question of “what is real and what is not” is soon presented with difficulties. It is difficult to envision life on “the other side.” How do beings there spend their time? What is it they do, and why do they do it? What if anything is their relationship to us? For that matter, what is our 3D life all about?

The world’s scriptures have been addressing these questions for centuries. That’s what scripture deals with: models of interaction between the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. The problems, the techniques, the models are, after all, just so many varieties of packaging. The reality remains the same. But in our time, neither science nor religion — neither believers nor materialists – give us a credible picture of the meaning and nature of life, nor a picture of the afterlife that we can relate to. So where can we find one?

Well, the closest to first-hand information that we can get, at least until we ourselves drop the body and cross over, is direct communication with someone in the non-physical.

Of course I am aware that common sense would argue that we and the deceased cannot communicate. The trouble is, “common sense” depends upon two unstated assumptions. The first says the past is gone and the future is not yet created and the present is all that exists. The second says the dead either cease to exist or exist beyond our range.

Understandable assumptions, but neither one is true. Centuries of recorded experience testifies to people seeing the future and communicating with the dead. Souls live on after life in the 3D universe, as alive as when they were here, but outside of time and space. Being outside of time and space, all times and all spaces are available to them, which is why we can communicate with them about things in our life that happened long after they were gone.

That doesn’t mean that we can know for sure that we aren’t just making it up, nor that we know just who we are interacting with, nor that the information we receive is true. But those are the wrong questions. The only thing we can know, and the only thing we need to know, moment by moment, is—does the material resonate? In other words, does it feel true? Is it useful to think that way? From that point, what you do with what you have found is up to you.

Explorers by definition move into poorly mapped or unmapped territory, intending to help fill in the map for those who follow. It cannot be required of them that they always know what they are doing, or where they are going. If you were to stick to “respectable” or “common sense” explanations and pathways, what kind of exploring would that be? Sometimes you have to just keep on going and trust that eventually things will sort out. Exploring is the only alternative to either taking things on faith, or refusing to think about them at all. All that can be required of explorers is that they be resolute, honest, and a bit skeptical even of the maps they themselves help to draw.

This is the third volume of a series of conversations I had with my old friend Rita Warren, who died (or passed over, or changed state, or dropped the body – however you want to put it) in March, 2008, at the age of 88.

Rita had been the first director of the consciousness laboratory at The Monroe Institute (TMI), and she and I were was very familiar with the use of Monroe’s technology to assist people to enter into altered states of consciousness. In the autumn of 2000, I did a series of ten sessions in TMI’s isolation booth, or black box, and posted the transcripts to a group of email friends, naturally including Rita.

In 3D life, Rita was 26 years my senior, and our backgrounds were different in many ways. But we shared an intense interest in the hidden nature of things. So, in the summer of 2001, she and I set out to see if we could get the answers to a few simple questions. Instead, what we got was a new picture of interaction between the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. We sat down once a week for several months, she asking questions about the hidden side of life and I, doing my best to stay in a mildly altered state, relaying whatever answers came to me. She and I both knew that information obtained this way is subject to error, but we also knew that it could provide valuable insights.

Session by session, “the guys,” as we called our interlocutors, introduced and built upon certain themes, and as we absorbed the picture they were painting, our lives changed. We decided that the material had importance for others besides ourselves, and I started to edit the sessions for publication, and got Rita to write an introduction.

But by the time the book of transcripts (titled The Sphere and the Hologram) came out, Rita had already made her transition. She died March 19, 2008, and came to me in a dream to assure me that she was fine, and I assumed our work together was over.

Six and a half years later, in December, 2014, I dreamed of her saying she was ready for us to work together again. I was surprised, but pleased. The next morning, I sat down with my journal and announced myself ready. I was prepared for anything or nothing, as usual in this business of communicating.

(When working alone, I write down a question, or even just state my readiness, then I move into a receptive state and take down whatever comes, alternating between questioner and receiver as the material dictates. Sometimes it comes fluently and I can write it down word for word without thinking. Sometimes I have the sense of it, but need to do the phrasing. Occasionally we wind up arguing over meanings, or over the sense of the material.)

That was the first of six months of sessions, usually every day, with the exception of one two-week hiatus. Throughout that time, Rita set out to answer the same questions she had been pursuing in 3D life, with the benefit of her new vantage point. That seemed to be about as direct a communication with the non-physical side I was likely to get.

In mid-May, we seemed to reach a natural place to pause, in and that was all right with me: We had accumulated quite enough material to change anybody’s life. Bob Friedman, my former business partner at Hampton Roads, now heading up Rainbow Ridge Books, offered to publish the new transcripts, and I was delighted to accept. He broke the transcript into two three-month segments, and Rita’s World, Volume I was published in September, 2015 – a remarkably quick turn-around. Volume II was slated for publication the following September, and again I thought perhaps Rita and I had completed our task.

Then, in February, 2016, I was lying down in bed when a sudden thought came to me, like the sun cutting through fog, and I knew that Rita was ready for me to get back to work. So I got some coffee and sat down at my desk, and we were off to the races once again.

In reading the material that follows, it will help if you keep these concepts in mind.

• “Sometimes, to understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B, you have to understand A.” One of the most enlightening concepts I have come across, which Rita gave me while she was still in the 3D world, this explains why some things can’t be said directly, but must be hinted at until other changes in your viewpoint allow you to see it more clearly.
• “The 3D world and the non-3D world are not two things, but one.” Divisions in the universe are never absolute, only relative. The implications of this one just keep expanding as you mull it.
• “We are not so much individual units, as committees learning to function as individuals.” This very important concept explains a lot about life and relationships. We are more like bundles of threads, connected in all directions to others, than we are like the images that the word “individual” summons.
• “As above, so below.” As said from ancient times, different levels of the world are scaled differently, but structured similarly.

In earlier volumes I was careful to preserve the flavor of the interaction — to preserve the sense of play between equals; to emphasize how natural such communication can be; to remind the reader that such communication takes place among the incidents of ordinary life. This time, I have edited myself out somewhat, in the same way that I have silently eliminated many false starts and rephrasings, in order to make a more compact statement. I trust I have not edited the humanness out of the resulting document. In any case this material can change your life, if you let it.