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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.

 

You die to the 3D world and your world is now your own mental world, your subjectivity, in a way you did not experience previously, perhaps, except in dreams. Your previous communication with the parts of yourself you were not conscious of may have taken place entirely without your conscious knowledge; or you may have had anomalous experiences; or perhaps you casually or occasionally or routinely or systematically made it a practice to broaden that communication. You can see that in each of these cases, your reaction to the experiences that follow cessation of sensory contact with the 3D is going to be different. What is familiar will evoke different reactions than what is not.

But in any case, your first experience is going to be a confrontation with yourself as you were, rather than yourself as you conceptualized yourself. Your idea of who you were is going to meet the reality of who you were.

Now, by that I don’t mean, you were a fraud. I mean that nobody gets to look at themselves as they are, but only as they look in a mirror, so to speak – and mirrors reflect us to ourselves only to a limited degree, and usually only from one vantage point. We see a small amount, and infer more, and confuse a lot of what we really are with what we wish we were and what we imagine we are.

It is said, we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.

Largely true, and hard to avoid, because in each case we judge by what is easiest to observe. But now, conditions are different, and in effect everything changes. You know how NDE accounts often stress that one’s past-life review demonstrates all one’s actions not only again from one’s own viewpoint but also from the viewpoint of everyone else involved. Well, that is cramming a non-3D, non-sequential experience into 3D sequential terms.

I can see that. It isn’t that you are watching a movie, but that you suddenly see wider and deeper.

Yes except “suddenly” is a time-oriented term that may mislead. I am describing the change as part of a natural process, a sort of flowering, a blossoming-out as the soul decompresses from its long 3D experience.

When you see your life from all sides at one, to a greater or lesser degree, you pass through a phase of judgment of yourself. The more judgmental you are, the more painful the process, for nobody is perfect. Nobody lives up to his or her standards. Nobody is “without sin,” so to speak.

However – this is only a phase. It is not imposed from without and it isn’t exactly necessary as part of the process. It is, shall we say, a likely part of the process, the result of a bad habit, you might say.

“Judge not, lest you be judged.”

Or perhaps, judge not lest your habit of judging others is going to turn itself on itself when all “external” life is gone. But judging yourself is only a habit! It is only a stage you go through. If you don’t go through it at all (as little children wouldn’t, perhaps) your process is smoother and less painful. If you cannot get out of it, you get stuck, and here you see souls experiencing themselves in hell.

Judgment contains the assumption that there was a standard against which one could be (and would be) measured. As long as you see your remembered life in the context of judgment, just that long are you going to be enmeshed in regret and humiliation and pain and a vain wish that you had been other than you were. And this condition is particularly painful because you can’t (as you did when in 3D) steer it to less painful thoughts, or more self-approving channels. You are, in effect, caught in a nightmare from which there is no exit.

This stage of judgment – of self-judgment, let me emphasize – lasts as long as it lasts, depending upon several variables. One is the degree to which the conscious mind has been accustomed to blocking out data and impulses – guidance – from its non-3D self, like a headstrong teenager. Obviously, the easier the non-3D can smooth the way by suggesting there is another way to see things, the better. Another is, as I say, the extent to which the 3D has been in the habit of judging rather than accepting. In a way, that habit is the same habit as refusing input from guidance; it is an insisting on its own 3D-limited viewpoint as absolute. A third variable may be considered (by the soul undergoing the process) external, and we won’t go into that quite yet.

In any case, the soul, upon losing access to the 3D world, confronts itself not only (not even primarily) as it has been, but as it is.

You see? In 3D you naturally assume that the departed soul sees its life primarily or entirely in the context of the 3D life it just departed, or emerged from, rather. But is that how you live your life day to day while still in 3D? Do you wake up each morning comparing yourself to what you were in fifth grade? Or do you address yourself to the questions confronting you in your present moment? This is often lost sight of, it seems to me, in discussing the soul’s emergence. It may be bewildered and its only immediate frame of reference may be oriented toward the 3D life that is all it remembers (at first), but the past is not its concern. What it needs to know is, “Where do I go from here? What do I do? Who and what am I?”

It is the same group of questions that surround you in 3D, you see, only the conditions are different.

While you are in judgment, progress stops. You go over and over it, unable to correct past errors, unable to retroactively make better choices, unable to – in short – make amends to others or (in a sense) to yourself. “I could have done so much better” is the theme song of this stage. But it doesn’t last forever. It changes, the moment (whether the moment come slowly or all at once) that you realize that what has been done has been done, and you are what you have made yourself, and now what? Once you decide to get on with it, you are through with the vain regrets. Regret and judgment is a form of grabbing the sides of the sliding board, you know. Once you let go of having to be right (for that is what the habit of judgment is all about), progress resumes and you’re moving again. Everything changes, as we shall see.

 

 

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

 

Keep in mind always that we are moving toward explaining life “on the other side” – which means life when not constricted by the special circumstances of life in the constricted environment of 3D, and we are doing so by moving from what you know, and subtracting.

So, you lose your physical senses, which reorients you inward. And at first, what do you “see” there? You initially experience yourself as you have been experiencing yourself in 3D existence. That is, Frank on his deathbed, losing sight and even awareness of the 3D, is as if in a dream. He processes thoughts, emotions, memories, fantasies – and does so as he did in dreams.

Well, you know dreams. Sometimes you are the main character and things are happening to you, or perhaps you are trying to do something. Sometimes you are watching a movie and, although you are not aware of yourself as audience, still you are watching a drama that may seem to have nothing to do with you, but is engaging. And sometimes it is as if you come in in the middle of the film and leave – or the film stops – in the middle. All this has one common feature. You do not feel in control of it, it does not seem to be emanating from you even if it is connected with you. you seem to be the passive recipient of experiences with their own autonomy. That is, they seem external to you.

And while they do, I imagine they may seem grotesque or frightening sometimes.

They may. Not every dream is a nightmare. Less important (ultimately) than whether they are frightening is that they are experienced as external to you, in the way the 3D world appeared external.

After dreaming comes Lucid Dreaming, and as you were told, Out-of-Body experiences are merely the third rung on that particular ladder. It’s a useful analogy. First comes the oblivion that is the blotting-out from your mind of awareness of, and ability to communicate with, the 3D. Then comes internal orientation, a rough equivalent of dreaming. These two stages come in very different forms depending upon how the person has lived, and how died. They may be quick and easy or prolonged and painful. Thus the disparity of descriptions. But one way or another, you lose sight of the 3D, and your world is composed of you as you experienced and shaped yourself.

The soul confronts itself.

Let’s say, the soul is no longer distracted by externals, and its world is then – itself.

Now, in a sense it was never any different. In a sense, you have been living in a world that always reflected you to yourself (not that you necessarily knew it) and always seemed to have its own objective existence, amid which you lived as a sort of island of subjectivity.

So, now your world has reduced itself to – you. Not news, not chores, not routine, not projects, and not the inexorable march through time. Now it is you among what happened, you experiencing who you made yourself in a long or short lifetime, and nothing else.

And if you died as an infant?

Then there won’t be much to experience, will there? On to the next stage smoothly and soon. Or do you think they remain suspended? But let’s not divert ourselves, but continue.

Your world now consists entirely of you. As in a dream, you do not direct your consciousness, but seem to be directed, you do not know (nor think about) by whom. Everything you were now appears to you, including and perhaps we should say especially, the parts of yourself that you most actively repressed in 3D life. It isn’t necessarily fun to experience. And it certainly doesn’t fill you with pride. Seeing who you are without being able to sugar-coat it can be a bitter pill. But, it – the bitter taste – doesn’t last forever, only until you get over judgment and get to acceptance.

The specifics of what you encounter when you encounter yourself naked to your gaze are obviously going to be – specific. Everyone will have a specific experience, and the way you have lived will shape what you have to bear. But – don’t worry about it. As in 3D life, you don’t get more than you can bear. Sooner or later, you realize that all is well and is always well – no less between awarenesses (i.e. between worlds) as in 3D or in non-3D.

You move beyond judgment into acceptance. What does this mean? It is the same as saying, you lay down your partial view for a more inclusive one. You realize that the self you are accustomed to, with its values and virtues and shortcomings, is only part of who you are.

This coming to realize that you are not only who you experienced yourself to be, but are more, is dependent upon your ceasing to cling to what you were. You stay stuck, clinging to the sides of the sliding board, until you willingly let your previous identity slip away as the world slipped away. One more loss. One more coin for the ferryman over the Styx.

The price of admission.

The price of admission to the next act, yes. And of course, bear in mind, none of these losses is permanent, or I should say none is what it seems to be.

 

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

 

So, Miss Rita, you lost your ability to connect via the senses, and then –?

A loss is a gain elsewhere. Losing one’s tether to one thing frees one to do or go somewhere else, if at the cost perhaps of some disorientation. But that cost is a “perhaps”, and its extent depends upon many circumstances, all of which turn out to be intrinsic to the individual 3D consciousness and its connections. But at first it often seems otherwise. Losing consciousness (temporarily) of the 3D world makes possible one’s re-opening to the non-3D world. But it doesn’t happen in one leap and it doesn’t happen, all the way down, but by a slower or faster process of successive openings-up

Losing connection with the 3D world seems not a matter of choice, but of external necessity. You may be fine with it, even be eager for it, but you do not feel it is up to you. You are being carried over the falls willy-nilly, like a mother in childbirth. It is out of your hands. But then you lose sight of the 3D world, and your first steps to reawakening amount to looking around at who you are (which means who you have been, and have done, and how you have experienced yourself) in the absence of what may now be felt to be the distraction of “the external world.”

The “it” meant by “you can’t take it with you” is more (or less) than physical assets. It is – everything. Identification, habit-patterns, relationships, acquired skills, painful memories, accomplishments, failures. Everything, in layers gets stripped off, but the delamination process may be thought of in 3D as having been experienced either all at once or sequentially. Time isn’t really a factor in the process, and so how it is experienced will vary person by person.

The “past life review,” I take it you are referring to.

That, but not only that. The stripping away of one’s identification with 3D attributes is much more than that, and in fact may not involve that at all in the way people think. I’m talking about the fundamental reorientation of the consciousness as it realizes that it isn’t what it thought itself to “only” be, and isn’t what it thought itself to “potentially” be.

To avoid misunderstanding, I think I ought to say that the losses you itemize are not permanent losses. We don’t lose our mental habit-patterns, for instance, or our memories or anything.

No. But they were never what they seemed to be, and so it is as accurate to say they are lost as to say our understanding is transformed. And in the process of falling away from the 3D, it is a loss, just not an irretrievable one.

 

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

 

I want to describe to you what cannot easily be described in sensory terms, so rather than adding characteristic after characteristic, we will at first proceed by a process of subtraction – and that is one description of how life does it, when we die to the 3D and awaken to the non-3D.

So, there I am on my deathbed. First I lost the power to communicate with the 3D world. This is important, as it begins to re-orient us. We communicate [during life], expecting or anyway hoping for some response. This orients us outward, toward the perceived “other” in the 3D world. When that communication is shut down, we reorient. An analogy might be, sleep. While we sleep, we do not expect to channel our communication toward a perceived-as-separate world that can be accessed only by means of the physical senses. We let that world fall away – or, you might say, we forget it is there. That is the first stage of dying to the 3D, too. We forget the 3D world is there.

Notice, I am not talking about the stages of going from health to death, I’m not describing the process of physical death. I’m describing the process of awakening to the larger world. The re-orientation is a big change The 3D world disappears. It is forgotten. Memory may remain, and dream and fantasy, all needing to be sorted out, but just as in dreams, your awareness is on your end of the communication, not on input from, or output to, a perceived 3D world.

These are simple concepts, and I hope people won’t complicate them by parsing my words too finely. You lose the ability to connect with the “outside” world, you cease to intend to or expect to, and in reorienting you find that your awareness is now upon a world at first consisting entirely of your own mental  constructions.

“You find” doesn’t mean you are aware of the change, though.

No, very much not. Perhaps I should say “it happens,” or “behind your back.” That is a good point. You are not aware of the scene changing, any more than you are when you dream.

So, with the 3D gone, your natural orientation toward it gone, you are more in the world you have experienced in dreams than in any solid stable mental structure. And this, you see, is why what you do in life matters in this regard. Your mental habits may make the transition easier or harder, and will in any case shape it.

I don’t mean to imply that the purpose of life is to assure a smooth transition! That would be like saying the purpose of eating a meal is to make it easier to wash the dishes afterwards. But it does have that effect, and you might as well know it.

I see no point in trying to describe the various worlds people will find that they have, in effect, created for themselves. Let’s stick to what Rita experienced, because Rita is the closest experience I have.

You tend to think of me as Rita now in the non-3D, and so I am, but that isn’t all I am, and therefore it isn’t quite what I am. But our shared Rita experience is the bridge between us, so it is convenient to funnel the communication through that part of me.

So my world constricted, expanded, changed focus. Death turns the knob of the microscope and the plane that had been clear and obvious becomes hazy or non-existent, and other things swim into view.

The world I opened up to, or that filled my consciousness, of course changed as I went along. It unfolded in stages. That’s just the nature of progression, first a little, then more, then before you know it you are in new territory, then you start remembering it, then you are in your new home.

The first stage came when I was still defining myself as Rita. And, see, here is where you are going to have to loosen, without discarding, that analogy to dreaming. Unlike dreaming, or like lucid dreaming in this one respect –.you don’t lose consciousness of yourself as actor or spectator. You are as aware of yourself as experiencer as you ever were aware of yourself as experiencer in waking 3D life. So, it isn’t fantasy and it isn’t mental nor emotional free-flow association either. It could be described as life coming at you, same as always, only now it is entirely subjective and not disguised as “objective” in the sense of being somehow or somewhat disconnected from you.

I heard you saying that with the senses no longer orienting us to life, we still experience ourselves as a consciousness at the center of whatever we experience. Things keep happening, apparently on their own, following some law we don’t necessarily know about, just following their own nature, whatever that may be.

That’s right. That is the first stage after the senses are gone. We still define ourselves as we were, but it looks like the scenery had changed, and then the rules of the game. But that’s for next time. Thanks for your co-operation – you, and anyone reading this. We’re all in this enterprise together.

 

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

 

[Rita:] One way to provide that tap is to proceed from the familiar to the less familiar. So let’s revisit my own reawakening and see if that doesn’t provide the explanation with the necessary grounding in the familiar.

I left 3D life in a very deliberate manner, remaining several days in a coma to preserve a stable platform  while I explained what was to come. This avoided quite a few problems. The body, anchored as it is in 3D and 3D’s encasement in a moving and recalcitrant time-frame, provides a stable reference point that allows one to explore the non-3D without the risk of one’s mental projections becoming confused with an “external” reality – whence comes every form of delusion and lost-ness. If one explores and gets “lost,” so to speak, but is still tied to a body in a place and time, one gets reeled back in before too long, and nothing lost and some experience gained.

I see. And that’s what you were doing.

Not consciously from the 3D side, of course. (And, parenthetically, this is another advantage of being on good terms with one’s non-3D aspect; less friction between purposes.) But yes. That’s what I was doing.

When I released the 3D – dropped the body, as TGU always put it – I was conscious already, so did not experience the disorientation that sometimes may occur. But that is not the same as saying that I was instantly aware of all I was, or all I was part of. I had attained a stability of consciousness that would prevent me from losing my sense of myself, and yet that was pretty much all I had, at first.

Like you, like anybody, I had a hodge-podge of ideas about the afterlife, and no way to know which were true, which were false, and which were distortion. The way to find that out is twofold: Experience as in feeling around, and Remembrance as in reconnection. In a sense, the same thing seen two ways. In a sense, very different processes. But we don’t have time to begin on this now, so let us pause until next time.

 

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