Beliefs

We were in the process of explaining how the newly ex-3D soul experiences and redefines itself as it gets oriented.

Yes. There is a need for such description, you understand, in that so many older ways of imagining it no longer speak to people, because they are ready and able now for more sophisticated explanations. You know that Bob [Monroe] was always saying our job is to turn our beliefs into knowns. But that isn’t so easily done, and the hardest step, in a way, is realizing that what we think is a known may be really only a belief.

So if people believe in science and believe that science has established certain things that mean that materialism is the only rational conclusion a thinker can draw, you are not going to be able to get them to think their way out of that box unless you (or life) can persuade them that the logical underpinnings do not hold. A world-shaking experience may do it – an NDE, say, or, as in my case, significant experiences during a Gateway. Or, a silent unconscious following of internal promptings may lead to a slow rejection of previously accepted ideas and their replacement by more alluring ones.

One way or another, new beliefs may supplant old, or new openness may supplant older rootedness. The “how” of it is not predictable and not particularly worth examining for clues as to how it may be spread more widely. That isn’t your job, nor anyone’s. People’s reorientation may safely be left to themselves; everybody has guidance that will work with them in ways no outside influence could equal in skill or perseverance.

But you have to keep in mind, the times demand (or you might equally say, allow) different people for different eras. It is a reciprocating process, as you like to put it. Beliefs shape minds and minds shape cultures and cultures shape beliefs and beliefs shape minds, forever.

A new civilization comes into being by altering what people believe, which alters what they experience, which alters what they do and what they want done. That is as true a way of looking at history as thinking the reorientations come about somehow at random, and certainly as true as thinking that each new stage of civilization is the result of “progress” in any absolute sense, rather than progression, which is not the same thing.

Now, none of this is a detour or a side-trail. It is important for every person who is reading this or ever will read this, because one of the most important concepts they need to absorb is that “the way the world is” is the most efficient prison ever constructed, but the door of the cell has the key on the inside!

Vivid metaphor.

You don’t move people by argument or by intellectual understanding alone. You do it by vivid images, easily grasped, easily remembered. The complication is that you also move people by a vivid image who haven’t heard, or wouldn’t have been able to follow, the arguments leading to the more sophisticated understanding. So in their case they have traded in one belief and drawn another belief from the deck. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that – people are too quick to criticize the way the world maintains itself – but recognize, that is a very different situation.

A belief snatched at is a superstition, as opposed to a belief grown into?

In the absence of internal guidance that would be a true enough description. Let’s say rationality plays a smaller part in people’s mental world than they sometimes think it does – and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is often their saving grace, leading them to act better than their conscious beliefs would lead them to.

All right. I’m a little at sea as to where we’re going, here.

Surely you don’t think that what the ex-3D soul’s experiences as it reorients itself is unaffected by the beliefs that shaped it in its 3D years, do you?

[Pause] Meaning – so be careful what you let yourself believe?

No, not at all.  You won’t have all that much control over what you find yourself believing. Meaning, so maybe there is a purpose to the creation of various environments for 3D life. Maybe the creation of certain environments allows the formation of certain types of minds, and maybe the existence of different belief-systems in the 3D minds that result are valued in and for themselves.

I’m sitting here pretty much in neutral, trying to grasp so many implications. One of them is – our 3D experiences are meant to help shape or reshape the non-3D environment.

That’s correct. The 3D isn’t just an amusement park.

And that implies that the non-3D feels a need for 3D-shaped souls with certain biases, for some reason.

How often do people go to so much trouble to build something, if they don’t expect to profit from it? I don’t mean milk it, but get some good out of it?

That’s sure not the way we’re accustomed to thinking of it – either this world or the next world.

No, and look how “the next world” has gone dead on you. It doesn’t inspire, it doesn’t seem real and comprehensible. So, we’re doing our bit to alleviate the symptoms by addressing the causes of a sense of meaninglessness. But you can’t expect new understandings to spread in an instant. Well, you can, in a sense: People sometimes catch new understandings like wildfire, but don’t expect it to be a rational process.

 

— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

A translation of a translation of a translation

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. 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. 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.

It’s funny, though. Real life has a lot more freedom than it would if it  were always a series of either/or situations.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Bob?

You are going to have to overcome your nervousness if we’re going to chat.

You know why I’m nervous.

Indeed I do. Quoting Bob Monroe is one thing, asserting that you are talking to him directly is a horse of another color.

It sure is.

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.

Rita’s dilemma about A and 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, or known commodity. 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.

Just like scripture.

Well, may the lord preserve my writing from becoming scripture!

Said with a smile, I recognize.

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. But 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.

In other words, we’re on our own as usual.

Would you expect anything else?

No, I suppose not. Well, thanks for this. Any more at this time, or do we go back to our usual sponsor?

I guess you’ll just have to see, won’t you?

Smiling. Thanks, Bob. Rita?

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 either as separate or as part of one vast faceless conglomerate, a closer analogy would be the color spectrum, where one color shades into another even though each is still distinguishable as itself, depending upon your definition.

We have been using shared threads as our analogy.

Yes, but any analogy used too long 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, but 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.

All right, got it.

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.

All right, Rita. Always enlightening. And thanks, Bob, as well. [slight pause] I sense you chuckling, Rita. What’s so funny?

He isn’t used to getting second billing.

That makes me laugh. Till next time, then.

 

— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Subtracting, substituting, adding

Remember, we are working toward building an understandable picture of non-3D life, proceeding by a process of subtraction from what was familiar, interspersed with substitution compensating for what was lost, and additions beyond that. That’s how life works, when you think of it – subtracting, substituting, adding.

The ex-3D soul had its losses, and experienced them fully. For a while, it may have clung to the sliding board, saying “not yet!” the way some say “not yet!” to death. But sooner or later, it said its goodbyes to Earth and all it had known. From its point of view, it lost everything but its memories, and even these, though not lost, were changed. After that, everything was substitution and addition.

At some point regaining the ability to experience and interact with 3D, I take it.

We’ll get to that. We haven’t yet finished with the additions represented by the ex-3D soul’s realizations of how much farther it extended than it had ever realized. One set of extensions expresses the soul’s own level; the other, the next layer up.

At one’s own level are the non-human intelligences with which the ex-3D interacted during the human life, largely beyond the range of consciousness. These non-human intelligences deserve a word.

Perhaps you can see that the very distinction between human and non-human is an artificial one, an approximation, and sometimes a useful one. Not so useful – and not maintainable – once you have left 3D, though, because the barrier between human and non-human dissolves (or is seen to have been only illusory) as soon as you leave the conditions that sustained it.

Some of those non-human forms of consciousness inhabit the life of the other kingdoms, vegetable and mineral and the rest of the animal kingdom beyond human. Some are included within the human consciousness only because they appear to be within the human body – hence, the intelligence of cells and organs is not necessarily seen as mere extensions of the same intelligence that permeates animals, say. In 3D we were all full of germs, but we didn’t think germs part of being human. We all exchanged (shared) air and – at a remove – solid matter and liquid matter in the form of food, but we never thought of it that way. Human conditions encouraged us to think in terms of us and not-us, not reflecting that the components of either side of such an illusory boundary would be shifting at every moment.

I can put this in a nutshell: All 3D was formed of consciousness. If everything is formed of consciousness, everything is alive and by definition [is] self-aware, although this doesn’t mean that other forms of life experience other forms of life that way. The penguin doesn’t necessarily experience the consciousness of ice or rock or even fish. I could go on, but no need.

Once the soul is ex-3D, this is obvious, because the boundaries and the forces that (seemed to) support those boundaries vanish, and what is left is seamless.

But sometimes people get a glimmering of this, don’t they? Thoreau got in trouble with a magazine for a sentence that said perhaps the pine tree would go to a higher heaven, “there to tower above me still.” That was called pantheism but it was closer to what you are saying here than most people’s beliefs.

What I am saying goes beyond that, but yes, he had a glimmering, and more than a glimmering.

So the whole human / non-human thing is only a relative difference, not only in the case of ETs but of the very air we breathe in and out.

The ex-3D soul has no reason to – and no ability to – maintain the artificial divisions that seemed so natural and obvious in 3D. It knows (not necessarily immediately and not necessarily predictably) that at any level of 3D life, scaling meant that As Above So Below was an accurate judge; that before matter and energy is consciousness. So, when it regains its view on the 3D world, it sees with different eyes. But before that happens, another redefinition is likely to happen.

Just as cells combine to make molecules (if you wish to see it that way, and molecules make tissues, and tissues organs, and organs bodies – in other words just as the entire structure of reality consists of communities of individuals at one level (themselves communities consisting of individuals at a smaller level) creating or participating in another level of organization above them, so it is after the 3D is behind you. So, and more than so.

These successive redefinitions don’t leave the ex-3D soul’s self-definition unchanged. How could they? And that is all that goes on in the after-death process, the awakening from the 3D trance. The ex-3D soul wakens to its new condition and finds that what has changed is only that it is as it always was, but now it knows what it was (and is).

But this is always true, isn’t it?

It is always true that life is the process of assimilation and (therefore) change. It is true that change is the law of life not only in 3D, but in All-D. (How could one walled-off portion of the All That Is be the province of change, and all the rest not?) It is also true that change implies decomposition as well as synthesis. But that’s another story.

 

 

— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Lost at sea

We left off with the soul realizing more what it really was and always had been.

It changes everything, you see. Nothing it was accustomed to remains to it, except – to the extent that it developed it in 3D life – the ability and habit of communicating freely with the rest of itself. If it had no such habit, it now has nothing whatever as a resource from its end of the polarity.

I think I know what that means, but just to be sure –

Everything we will ever examine will at the same time be a unit and a divisible collection, a single thing capable of being treated as if it were multiple. Definitions are relative. So, I say we’re going to examine a polarity between the larger being and the 3D individual, but neither is really a unit, and together they aren’t really a multiple. Single/not-single is a matter of how much stress we put on a given way of seeing it. There is no absolute difference between the larger beings and the various 3D beings each creates and incorporates, but it is not incorrect to examine them separately. Definitions are matters of convenience, in that sense.

Really, all we are saying is “Let’s look at them as if they were separate although we could equally accurately look at them as if they were parts of one thing.”

It isn’t exactly an “as if,” either. It is more a temporary focus on a thing’s separate-ness or community-ness.

To return to the original point: The ex-3D soul, considered as if individual, is, by itself, lost at sea. It has no means of communication, no means of perception, nothing by which to orient itself. A life spent gazing outward provides no resources when “outward” disappears and it is as if that soul were in silent darkness, with no memory of anything outside the 3D life just departed, and no ability to interact consciously with the only life it remembers. Without communication with its deeper self – the larger being – it would remain “stuck” indefinitely.

I get that we could think about ghosts in this context.

Many examples of non-3D spirits interacting in a not very conscious way with the 3D world could be investigated beginning with this description of their situation, and much would become clear, pretty quickly, that has eluded those trying to investigate from other points of view.

But we are following the ex-3D soul to see its possibilities and difficulties. The resolute non-believer is one extreme; at the other is the person who has achieved transparency in its relationship with the non-3D aspects of its being. Look what happens to such a person: It dies to the 3D, but it does not lose contact with that “inner” self, because that connection never depended upon sensory intermediation. It reviews its life, in a way, in that any restrictions on its span of consciousness are removed.  Although the “past life review” is not the sequential process it is often described to be, still the essence is the same. From being held in the present moment, it is now able to get the entire life in a true perspective, and that changes the ex-3D mind’s opinions and judgments retrospectively.

However – seeing one’s past life while being in conscious connection with the larger being makes that experience radically different from what it is when one experiences oneself to be alone. The stages of self-condemnation, etc. are fleeting or non-existent, because one’s basis for discernment is so much more solid and reliable. One has a vastly larger perspective, within which the “sins” and shortcomings of the individual are seen as “just one of those things” that accompany life in the 3D. The awakening to All-D existence of the newly ex-3D soul that has lived its life in close connection with its non-3D component is the other end of the polarity from the soul that experiences a lack of everything it knew.

And everybody fits somewhere in the bell curve between the two extremes.

Set out the extremes and you have delineated the field, and pretty much set out all the possibilities.

So – leaving aside any ex-3D souls that may be considered “stuck” because they have not yet gained the ability to perceive and interact with their new surroundings – we see that the ex-3D soul is in a new condition, but not an uncomfortable one. You have died to the 3D, losing all access as you lose your senses with the death of the only thing [the body] that anchored you to the continually-moving present. You have seen your self-definition change repeatedly, as you became consciously aware of how far you extend among your contemporaries, and how far you extend backward and forward in time. And, most radically, you are introduced to being a small part of a larger functioning being, rather than an independent or at least autonomous unit.

By the way, your new expanded realizations include that you were (hence, are) a community at a lower level of organization, as well. The subordinate consciousnesses that contributed to the 3D individual’s life are just as valid as any other. You know of different intelligences working the body for you – “processing sugars,” as you always say. But is it not clear that your intelligence also has other levels, other components that might be examined as if separate?

So, the first stage of entering upon non-3D life is total redefinition. Everything you thought you knew is seen in so different a context as to be seen only as a special way of seeing things. Even if you are very connected to your non-3D component during life, you’re in for surprises. But they aren’t necessarily unpleasant ones, so don’t concern yourself too much about it. You couldn’t tell a child about the preoccupations and satisfactions of life as an adult, so don’t expect that you as a 3D being can understand All-D life now in the way you will then. Timing is everything.

Remember, the 3D is the natural, unavoidable center of your interest while you are there, but it is not necessarily the center thereafter. So don’t let yourself unconsciously assume that it will be. This is attempting to give you a window to a world that may not concern itself too much with the room you’re living in.

 

— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Reorientation

Remember, as we proceed, what our goal is. Ultimately we want to convey a sense of “everyday” life in the non-3D, as part of the All-D, and in order to get a standpoint to do that, we are lightly describing the experiences of the soul as it leaves the 3D element in which it was created, successively stripping off illusions and distortions caused by life under 3D conditions. It is by this process of subtraction that we hope to move from the familiar to the less familiar without taking great leaps that may leave people gasping for breath, or disoriented by having lost their grounding.

The soul loses sensory access, and so turns its unbroken attention on to itself. It goes through shame, remorse, vain regrets, etc., and comes to acceptance because after all, “what’s done is done,” and at some point it becomes “where do we go from here.” This wouldn’t necessarily happen if the soul were on its own. It’s important to realize that, and why it is true, and what it means. But before we delve into this subject, a few more orienting words.

The soul, examining itself, begins to realize that in one sense, it was never an individual at all. Instead it perceived itself as individual, mainly because it was unable to perceive all the ties linking it in three different ways. First, by relationship. Second, across time. Third, within.

  • Relationship – there was always someone else balancing anything that ever happened in 3D life, and that was never a coincidence. The soul itself was composed of threads, which extended in all directions. In a very real sense, that soul was connected to everything that existed, because the fibers that ran through its being were common to the rest of creation, just as the atoms of air that the body breathed were not unique but were part of a common heritage shared by all.
  • Across time – those threads extend to “past lives” and “future lives” because, of course, they are not confined to any one moment. They do not come into being with a given present moment and cease to exist with another. They are part and parcel of the being; they exist. And in extending along the timeline of one given life, they connect it to all other times they share being in. so that is a second way the soul realized that it was more than it knew itself to be.
  • And the third, the most profound connection of the three, perhaps, is the soul’s connection not within the context of 3D only (as connections in time and space might be said to be) but with the non-3D, hence with All-D.

As I said earlier, if the soul were on its own, it wouldn’t necessarily be able to move from its isolated sense of itself as it had been, when it experienced itself as bounded by 3D restrictions and conditions. But it is never alone. There are no absolute separations in the universe. Not only was it always connected via its threads to (essentially) everything and everybody else, it was always connected to the larger being from which it was created, whether it knew it or not. It experienced that connection in various ways – as instinct, hunches, intuitions, “luck,” feelings – and it conceptualized it in various ways, mostly culturally influenced. God, the unconscious, the larger being, All That Is, “the universe,” fate, destiny, karma, Blind Chance (this one is a particularly comic way of transposing guidance into a form acceptable to an outlook that does not include the possibility of guidance), and so forth. If the cultural conditioning exists and is strong enough to predominate, the soul may even come to have a strong need to assert that any connection it may feel is only illusion, delusion, superstition, in short, unreal, hence not needing to be further considered.

This is the third profound way the soul is led to redefine itself. It realizes first-hand its identity with the larger being from which it was created. And that gives it an entirely new view of its own existence, purpose, and prospects. It’s simply a matter of reorientation, but not necessarily simply explained.

We have been showing that at any level what looks like units are actually communities at a smaller level and part of an organism at a larger level. An individual human being is a community of trillions of cells and millions of threads, but is only a part of the larger being of humanity, even considered only in physical terms, without considering its connections across time and space. It is that quality of being at once a community of units at a smaller level and a part of a vastly larger organism at a larger scale that I call, for convenience, monad.

Once a soul realizes that it was never individual in the way it thought (or feared), everything changes, both retrospectively and, at least equally importantly, prospectively. Instead of having nothing to do because it could no longer exist in 3D, and instead of having as prospect only, at best, returning to 3D life as part of a new being, suddenly it realizes, 3D isn’t the only game in town, and, as part of something so much larger and more extensive, it doesn’t need to play only in one place and time, so to speak.

 

— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Greater than you thought, and less

You – the nominal person who just died to the 3D world – have gone through a couple of difficult stages, of which judgment of your failings was probably the most painful. But as acceptance replaces condemnation, you are ready to move again.

You’ve stopped holding on to the sides of the sliding board.

That’s right. Among the fears, perhaps chief is not, “I can’t take this,” but, “I’m worried about how much worse it can get.” At some point, in one way or another, you release your hold on what you knew of what you are. You allow yourself to see more deeply.

You have passed your first hurdle of unbearable self-criticism, and you are resigned to seeing what comes next. But remember, it is still that process of understanding A and B better by successively looking at each with slightly better understanding, and then seeing differently. In other words, you are alternating perception and discernment, just as in life. That connected two-part process is a mental process, following mental (that is, non-3D) laws, which is why it is unchanged even in the absence of the body and of relentlessly sequential time.

So, you have absorbed the shock to your self-esteem, and you have accepted any guilt attached to your not having done more with your life, or better. You have learned that the narrative wasn’t just the way you experienced it (or, one might equally say, constructed it). Then comes further transformation, that makes what went before into the slightest of prologs.

A parenthesis, here: I am not going to describe large portions of that early stage that may have been described in NDE literature. There’s no point, because even if there are generalities, still every new recovery from 3D is different. I  mention it lest you think I’d forgotten, and lest you think I was by silence contradicting such testimonies.

So, the transformation. You see yourself as you have always seen yourself, as an individual who had gotten born, had grown and lived a life interacting with others. You look closer and you see how you affected others and were being affected. In other words, you see that you lived not independently but as part of the web of life. This is about the stage in the process where your regrets are likely to be strongest.

You absorb that and look again and you begin to see ties you perhaps did not expect to see (invisible connections visible now for the first time) between you as individual and everyone and everything you experienced. Every book or movie, every association or society, every conversation, every ancient philosopher whose life or work touched yours, every piece of music – and therefore all the musicians who made that music. At some point you see these connections are not merely points of contact, but representations of tendencies. Music may seem to connect you to that particular musician, but as you look closer, perhaps you see that the reason why it connected was (as a result rather than a cause) because you share a thread, or a strand, with that musician.

Then it is a short step to see that all the people sharing that thread may be said to be an integral part of you. And there are uncounted numbers of threads, each with uncounted numbers of others sharing them, not all human. Your self-definition takes a serious hit, and either shrinks back or expands, depending upon your temperament.

So, another realization moves back and forth in time as part of that same expansion of self-definition. You realize that “you” — in a sense – lived in other times and places, and can connect those other parts of yourself, in the same way you can connect along threads or any other relationship.

There could be more examples, but that is enough. The point is, you start off thinking you are an individual and you find yourself realizing that yes you are, but also no you aren’t and never were.

  • Yes, you are and were, because you as soul were deliberately created by assembling potential traits, and were inserted into a given time and place to form a consciousness mediating your constituent parts. You were created, you were born into one body, you decided several million things, several million times in your lifetime, and so you created the habit-pattern that would (in a sense) be born into the non-3D to function along with its elders. All that is pretty individual, wouldn’t you say?
  • At the same time, you were never an individual in the way you thought you were. The soul was created and born, yes, but what was it created of? Two elements at least:
    • (1) threads of strands that had been formed by their own previous 3D existence, now continuing to live through you and anyone else sharing their strands.
    • (2) The indefinable spirit that animates us all. As far as we know, it has always been here, it remains vital and unchanged, and if it needs us, we don’t know why it does or for what it uses us.

Either way you look at it, though, you aren’t what you thought you were, but something far greater. At the same time, you see that at best you are a very small frog in a very big puddle. It’s enough to shake you up.

 

— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

An iterative process

So, we are dead to the world and we first turn our attention to who we are and were, as opposed to who we liked to think we were. We judge, and then judgment becomes acceptance. And then?

And then you are moving again, and what you are experiencing changes as it changes you. As long as you are stuck in judgment, additional perception cannot easily occur. Judgment is a form of shrinking from reality.

Now, we’ve edged into Bruce Moen’s description of our mental process as an alternation between perception and judging, haven’t we? Between open acceptance of input and examination of what has already been received? He pointed out that this is a reciprocal process, one half at a time, never simultaneous, because they are mutually contradictory, though complementary.

The description is accurate, but in your new situation, analysis is impossible. The newly untethered soul, even though it is dealing with its own composition and experiences, has no ability to control its own mental process. Like the newborn infant in 3D, it experiences life coming at it full-tilt, none of it making sense and no way to make sense of it. Consider: What is instinct?

Guidance.

Go to the head of the class. Of course it is. But it will be easier for you to spell out your idea of what I mean, and then I will correct as necessary.

Babies – animal or human – come equipped with instincts, although I’m not sure anybody knows the boundary between instinct and early learned behavior. In general it is as if animals come equipped with firmware as part of their hardware (the body) and as the basis for software (whatever they later learn). Is this firmware physical or mental or spiritual? I think our instincts – our firmware – are probably a little of each. The basis is in our genetics, common to one and all, encoded in matter. But that basis is also mental, or anyway non-3D in origin and function, because it is enabled and controlled from a different part of the entity than the developing fetus, the newborn baby. I suspect that the only reason that instinct seems universal is that most or maybe all babies are in excellent connection with the non-3D consciousness from which they were formed. That’s the best I can do at the moment, and I seemed to feel my concepts being fed to me and expounded upon as I wrote.

Yes, that’s the process called inspiration. You stay attuned and make the effort to respond, and another part of you provides feed. It is common, not always noticed.

All right, so consider your instincts to have been your non-3D component using its vast knowledge to assist you in dealing with a totally new and unpredictable and threatening and confusing and seemingly unstructured state of existence. The newly born 3D mind in so far as it is functioning independently has never experienced any of it. Only the mind that created it (which we call the subconscious or unconscious mind) knows the ropes. In the initial stages, the newly emergent mind is entirely dependent upon the non-3D mind and does not experience it as separate. It is only as the 3D mind gains enough experience that it gradually learns to function on its own,  begins to ignore or reject the promptings from the non-3D mind (the mothership, not the mother) and starts to make its own errors and learn its own lessons and plot its own course.

So now, keeping that in mind, return to your situation after you have dropped the body. You are in a sense new-born in an unfamiliar environment. Unfamiliar to the 3D-shaped part of you! but to the rest of you – it is home. You see the implication.

The better your connection to your non-3D component, the easier it can feed reassurance, calmness, sure-footedness.

That’s right. Instead of being caught in a nightmare or at best a continually changing kaleidoscope, you have a stable place to stand, and your surroundings apparently stabilize. I say “apparently” because of course it wasn’t your surroundings that were the problem.

Now, as you move from perception of chaos to a more structured perception of experience, you thereby engage your process of discrimination, of discernment, of sorting things out. In effect, your new world clears. But remember, that new world is not a world of externals; it is who and what (and even how) you are. In a sense, you retrace your existence in 3D, looking more closely at the underpinnings and the more subtle relationships.

Is it an iterative process, then?

Of course. To understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B, you have to understand A. It’s the same thing. So each new pass over the same data yields new insights which inform the next pass. Understand, this is being somewhat crammed into 3D terms, but that’s what happens. The more you look, the better you understand. The more you understand, the better you look at the same things and the better you understand them. And so on and so forth, unpredictably according to each soul’s nature, because just as in 3D life (for obvious reasons!) there are the same differences in appetite for knowledge of any given subject, even oneself.

So – putting this only as a rough example, certainly not claiming it as an unvarying rule –

  • First comes “objectively,” then the realization that “objectively” doesn’t exist, and things are at the same time different when seen from different viewpoints (rather than this view being right and that one wrong).
  • Then you go into it again, seeing how the interactions produced unsuspected consequences, and you begin to see the hand of Fate, or of Divine Providence, or of Chance, depending upon your predilection.
  • Then you see that you and the others were not so much pinballs colliding as dancers, and you see that the dance was not improv, nor solitary, and you begin to suspect that there may have been orchestration.
  • And then, as you begin to look at yourself more closely, who you are becomes more apparent. Rather than defining yourself by your actions, you begin to see yourself by your tendencies, and then by your motivations, and then by your essential composition. And at this point the solid “you” you have been taking for granted begins in effect to dissolve (as a concept) and you start to see wider connections and implications.

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.