A matter of scale

[Rita:] I said we want to re-cover the ground covered last year. So let us begin. You will recall, I began by insisting on the unity of all things. Separations are merely relative separations, separations of function perhaps, or even what we might call separations of convenience. Sometimes the only way to look at a thing is to look at any one (or more) separable part of it, in order to bring it into range. You cannot study the world’s oceans all in one place or time, but you can study a drop of seawater in a microscope, or a species of fish in isolation from other aspects of the total “ocean” experience, or the effects on ocean of atmosphere, or any of many other specialized studies. You see? This is what science does – it says, the whole cannot be studied; let us examine it in pieces.

Now, in examining any phenomenon or situation, we may begin from the familiar or the unfamiliar, from the closest or the most remote, from the most similar or the least. Also, we may move into analysis of ever-smaller subdivisions, or analysis (though it will seem to you synthesis) of ever-larger interconnections, larger systems. Ultimately you wind up hedging your inquiry in some way or another – if not by design, then by default, because of constrictions on your time.

You can’t examine everything and so you are forced to choose.

However – and here is the nub of what I want to get across this morning, a simple point that will be obvious to some but a new realization to others – what you examine need not be pieces. You may, if you wish to, examine the whole of reality, and although this means ignoring vast amount of detail, it may be done and done productively.

I think you are saying what we examine is a matter of scale, and we can examine things at a smaller or larger or in-between scale, and whichever way we examine things, we will see only things at that level, because the whole thing would be too much to hold.

Your understanding is correct, because passed mind to mind, but I can not be sure that the understanding has been passed merely by words [in the absence of direct mind-to-mind communication]. It will be worthwhile for you to restate that in different words, just to be sure.

I got an image of a microscope – and I suppose a telescope would be an equally illustrative metaphor. If you look at reality at any given focus level, what you will see will be whatever is in focus at that level, by definition. But that also means, that is all that you will see. Whatever is larger or smaller or farther away in any sense will be as if it did not exist, or existed only as a blur or as a distorting side-effect.

Yes, and so anything you study will exaggerate itself in importance. It is natural for you – for anyone – to tend to lose sight of all of reality outside the area of concentration. It’s just natural – and for that reason, it must be guarded against, for it is not a conscious but an unconscious choosing, hence beyond conscious control.

But, given that you cannot hold the whole in your mind at any one time, and given that anything sufficiently far from your experience will probably be invisible to eyes not expecting to see it, how are you to proceed?

Dropping the body does not thereby allow you to see and understand the entirety of 3D creation, let alone the entirety of All-That-Is. So don’t get your hopes up (and don’t fear) that your curiosity will be satisfied merely by waiting until you are safely dis-incarnated.  The part never understands the whole from its own point of view. That’s what a point of view is, a perspective, a place from which to observe everything else from an assumed stable platform.

And so you may ask, in that case, what’s the use of the inquiry?

We cannot see things except from our own point of view. So to look at Rita / TGU / All-That-Is, each layer has its own’ appropriate scale of examination, and each is constricted to that scale – but – at the same time we are intimately connected to the other levels, in the same way a body is intimately connected to trillions of individual cells.

And information and insights may be passed directly between levels, which is a definition of the reason guidance is available and — looked at another way — a definition of the function of humans in 3D.

 

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

One thing, three aspects

[Rita:] You were awakened with a realization that the spatial analogy has snuck in to distort – or anyway to shape – your understanding of the nature of the individual mind and the joint mind and the larger being, etc.

And I get strongly that this is why I was led to pick up my copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth. I put it down as contrived and wordy and uninteresting – but only after his use of “I/we/Gaia” had registered.

Describe it in a few words.

His postulate was an entire planet that was one united, interconnected consciousness rather like our concept of the underlying unity of all mind except in his case the humans were fully aware of it and lived in an unbroken sense of their individuality as part of their belonging to a larger consciousness.

While I was in body I was “I (Rita) / TGU / All-That-Is.”

Hmm, I see it. A sort of expansion of Asimov’s concept beyond the physical.

That’s right. His thinking was always materialistic but didn’t quite appear so because of people’s habit of configuring life as physical versus non-physical (“the other side”) rather than individual pole / group pole – and of course that isn’t the end of it.

There is “I,” and that is Rita as I experienced and created her, an individual in the world, living a life of mixed continual consciousness, unconsciousness, and, eventually, what we might call a consciousness of self as well as of the external world. (This is going to take a lot of explanation!)

There is “TGU”, which is how you and I learned to think of it, but which I experienced long before as Guidance. That is, perception and guidance from outside or beyond the conscious self that propelled me through the everyday.

And there is “All That Is”, which some might think of as the living equivalent of the Akashic Record, or others as the Heavens culminating in God, or, well – everything.

We in bodies are those three things because they are not three things individually but one thing in three aspects. But they aren’t always equally noticeable, put it that way.

We have devoted quite a bit of time [in past sessions] to explain that the individual isn’t a unit at all, but is a community and part of larger and smaller communities. This has been a good way to loosen the constricting idea that is always seeming to force conflict between self and other, or between self as experienced in one lifetime, and its predecessor or successor life, as if it continues as a unit. (In one sense, by the way, it does, but we are a way from explaining that yet.)

We are now beginning another model, going over the same terrain – your experience of life (physical, emotional, mental) as it may be alternately understood in order to shed light by implicit comparison. This model does not begin with the individual even as so modified in concept, but with the totality of being.

You can see that beginning there might easily have left us in Cloud Cuckoo-Land or at best in ungrounded speculation. But as an alternative model – which means, keeping other, previous modes in mind — it will be quite helpful.

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

 

Experiencing the color orange

[Me:] We’re not there yet, in terms of putting this clearly, are we? Is that because I’m out of practice?

[Rita:} It is because you are out of your accustomed comfort zone, intellectually. This is always going to be a problem, for anybody except trance mediums. To move into new territory, you must somewhat suspend what you think you know, and, especially, what models you have found useful to that point. But you can’t (and therefore shouldn’t try to) discard everything, because that is what brought you to the new threshold. You have to hold it lightly, and the balance is going to be delicate. So your first new steps are usually, if not always, going to be halting and contradictory, and sometimes seemingly nonsensical and even meaningless, and all you can do is persevere and see if it winds up making sense.

Until you experience the reality of the color orange – if all you know is red and yellow – you may be unable to comprehend orange as a concept. How can a color be red and yet not red; yellow but also not-yellow? It won’t make sense, and your initial experience of orange may appear to be a distortion of red or yellow. You may chalk it off as distortion, bad perception, cloudiness. That’s why it is always important to give these things time to prove themselves one way or the other.

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

Alternation

[Rita:] One thing interruptions do is sever the day-to-day connection of thought. There is value and disadvantage, both, to continuity and to discontinuity, as to everything else in life. Between the lines, your own individual part of the enterprise tends to take over and say, “Okay, I’ve got this, I’ll drive, I know what I’m doing now.” And in some circumstances that is good, and helpful, and in some, not. It isn’t so good for changing direction unexpectedly or for exploring new terrain in new ways.

I suppose it’s the thing about beginner’s mind, being empty, as opposed to expert’s mind, being too full to easily change course.

You are on the right track. The division of labor between the two makes for flexibility and also for persistence. Imbalance tends to make things harder to accomplish. Of course at any given moment, one or the other tendency will predominate, but that is not imbalance, but alternation.

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

 

 

3D and non-3D interaction

 

Saturday, November 23, 2024

7:40 a.m. Reading Oliver Sachs, The River of Consciousness, I had ideas for a blog entry, probably gone now, but let’s see. Jon Holt, you were a psychiatrist, you were an explorer like us, what say you? For that matter, are you in direct contact with Sachs?

I can be. As you should know, anybody can be, if they have the sympathetic resonance. Just because he and I are both dead, so-called, doesn’t mean we are any closer or farther away than when we were in the body. The difference is in the distractions life throws up in the 3D world of separation.

Our language tempts us to think that once outside the body, our minds are less focused, less conscious, than they were.

Yes and no.

Heard that before!

Well, most things are a matter of how you look at them. In the 3D, you tend to get seduced by one way of seeing things, just as Sachs says in what you just read. Confirming evidence piles up; contradictory evidence tends to be forgotten or repressed. It requires a certain amount of awareness and determination to remember that one way of seeing things can never be the whole story. Nor two, for that matter. The closer you look, the more nuances you see, and so the more exceptions you find to your generalizations, until you have Swiss cheese and then maybe only crumbs without much connection.

So yes, the non-3D mind is less focused – until it is. And no; the non-3D mind is also less distracted once it is focused. both halves true, neither half the whole story.

So Oliver Sachs and I may coexist without consciously communicating in any way I could describe, and yet we wouldn’t be separated, we’d just be – well, coexisting. But then a friend contacts us and holds us in mind at the same time, and there is a connection. Did anything change? Well, yes and no. We are still what we were; our “vibes” aren’t any different, we haven’t been changed. But we have been brought to each other’s mind, you could say, and so although we aren’t changed, our shared awareness is a change. So, yes but no.

And I get that one of the functions of the 3D is to facilitate just that kind of non-3D to non-3D interactions. Hadn’t thought of that before.

You contact Lincoln and the mind you call Smallwood, and Carl Jung and Lincoln Steffens and Hemingway and various people you knew in the body. These are all the equivalent of neural pathways you have facilitated. Perhaps Lincoln and Jung and Hemingway would never have had any reason to work together, or (more likely, in fact) two or more of them would have “come together” from someone else’s 3D associations. It is a real construction of a non-3D link.

Probably for purposes we can’t grasp.

Purpose that isn’t any of your business, maybe. You do what you do for your own purposes, and yet everything you do has other effects, most of them unsuspected by you if only because of geographical or temporal distance. Everything ripples, and nobody knows all the patterns, nor needs to.

So let’s talk about my half-forgotten theme that came to me, reading Sachs.

You sure you want this in the open, on the record?

I wasn’t thinking it would be anything particularly sensitive.

It is all about what you see yourself doing.

Ah, I get it. Delusions of grandeur.

Accusations of delusions of grandeur. Within proper limits, what you have in mind is perfectly appropriate. And, you do keep it within limits. You are not deluded into thinking you are more important than you are. If anything, you are in the direction of the fallacy of insignificance.

In any case, I see the need.

Sachs was describing why certain ideas may come to nothing, or may come to nothing for 50 years or more, and he was showing how the scientific mind no less than the artistic mind is vulnerable to error for various reasons, not all conscious ones.

And I have been saying that our next civilization will be based on many things, some of which we have discarded as superstition.

[And I remember, typing this, that actually this was originally something we got from the guys. I have believed it long enough now that I am regarding it as my own idea, not that there is ownership of ideas.]

His point is that there are reasons why the truth in some things cannot be seen at a certain time or from certain intellectual standing points.

But the thinkers don’t usually recognize their own blind spots.

Considering the amount of psychic energy that goes into creating and maintaining those blind spots, that’s hardly surprising!

But I don’t have the background or the training or the time or the energy to do the shuffling though all the data that must be out there. No one does.

No, no one does, but civilizations aren’t built by any one person. Even an Einstein, a Newton, an Emerson, a Yeats, can make only a tiny contribution to changing how people see things – but nothing wrong with that, as your guys always say. A tiny bit of work carefully done, leads to future possibilities.

One thing there I see I would have disagreed with Sachs, he seems to have believed in luck, in chance.

That is one way to see things. It is only wrong if taken to be an absolute. Similarly, your way of seeing things is only wrong if taken as an absolute. By now you should know, nothing can be said that cannot be contradicted truly. Life contains all contradictions.

And does not contradict itself, I know. Sort of hard to see how a thing can be true and not true.

Instead of saying “be,” try saying “seem.”

Aha!

Yes. Most of what people know is actually how something seems from a point of view, not how it is absolutely, world without end amen.

And that’s why we need to be re-examining what we think we know.

If people could get into the habit of thinking, not, “This is how things are,” but “This is how things seem,” they’d find it less disruptive when they were forced to go with the flow. And your times – that were my times too, obviously – are plenty strong on flow.

Any concluding words? This doesn’t feel complete but I don’t know what if anything it is missing.

The reason you have been led toward uncovering your unconscious impulses, your habits and screens and scripts and all the unconscious filters that separate you from the here-and-now is so that you could be able to do just what we’re talking about:  to reexamine your mental and spiritual world in light of a wider, freer consciousness. Living in a freer spot amounts to living life more abundantly – and that more abundant life enables you to ask better questions, experience deeper meanings.

Clear, as soon as you say it. Okay, Jon, thanks. I trust that you will contact us if we can somehow help you, and in return we’ll keep an ear to hear you if you come prompting.

 

Post-election

Friday, November 8, 2024

1:40 a.m. I don’t know that I ever saw so plainly how an event like an election provides a fleeting opportunity to learn something about our own obscure processes. Nancy woke up on Wednesday, heard that Trump had won, registered the fact sort of neutrally, and snapped the radio off again. I learned of it at 2 a.m. or so, when I was up and browsing. Similarly, I shrugged. Not surprised, but not dismayed either.

Others, though, are responding in great fear, or in prospective apprehension, or in reasoned and reasonable worry – or, if they are on the other side of the divide, they are in hope and even excitement.

I have tried to get people to see that their reaction tells them nothing about whether or not they are feeling the future, but it tells them a lot about who they are right now. Only, you have to look and be willing to see.

It puts me in mind of the election of 1828, when sitting president John Quincy Adams was defeated by iron-hard, intolerant, self-righteous Andrew Jackson. That was not merely a lost election but the end of a way of doing things, the end of caucus elections among a small number of representatives, away from the cultured, somewhat insulated world of an Eastern and Southern aristocracy. It was the irruption into political life of the raw West, of the common people, of the previously excluded. It was a true revolution, and to the educated of the day it seemed the crack of doom. Could Jackson even read? Would he become a dictator? Would he not sweep aside the rule of law and become a sort of king?

Not every criticism of Jackson was wrong; not every fear of Jackson’s rule was warranted, not every one that was warranted was borne out in fact. An old saying has it that no dish is ever served as hot as it is prepared. Nor of course do we ever have the facts as to what another person’s motivations and hidden inner springs may be, given that the person himself may not know!

But people’s fears and their hopes are very high, unbounded by any realism yet. The sky will fall – or the promised land will be attained – and life’s unavoidable contradictions will not be allowed to spoil it this time (or, on the other side of the fence, will not save us this time).

All the tea-leaf reading, all the certainties! And what is it but Psychic’s Disease? “I feel this so strongly, it must be true.”

Well, you know what you feel. Is it too much trouble to examine why you feel that way, what it says about who you are? Don’t put it on “the objective situation.” It isn’t that you feel the way you do because “any reasonable person would.” Step back from the “objective situation” and pay a little more attention – a lot more attention – to your, subjective, situation. If you are in fear, how are you in fear? What does it say of you, that your belief in the world, in life, does not uphold you? Does your fine philosophic understanding vanish in the face of “real life” events? And, if so, how much is your precious philosophy worth? If it vanishes in the mist when you face something you’d rather not see, is it real? Was it ever real?

But there’s not much use in saying all this, though I may as well, since it came pouring out. It is the strangest thing to me, but people can’t see that the objective thing is not what they think they fear, but that they fear. What you think may happen may or may not turn out to become fact, but either way the one fact that you can bank on is what you are feeling and what it is based on within your psyche.

It is so odd – and so accustomed a situation for me – I can see the hopes and fears of both sides, and to me the processes and flavor are pretty similar, if opposite sides of a coin, but to either side, the other side consists of fools and knaves. There are plenty of fools and knaves, all right, but they aren’t conveniently lumped in only one party. Yet people seem comfortable only when they can tell themselves that ii is that way: They are angels, their opponents are fools and knaves.

It’s like living among people who have been hypnotized, who think they are in normal consciousness. And the one thing they are likely to agree upon is that this way of seeing things is mistaken, or wrong-headed! Blessed be the peacemaker, for he shall be shot at from both sides.

You guys want to add anything?

You seem to be doing well enough on your own.

Am I going too far?

Not too far in expressing your opinion. That doesn’t mean your view is the only way to see things, of course.

What? What?! Okay, which are you, fool or knave?

Yes, very funny, but it is worth remembering that even the most accurate analysis of anything must fall short of comprehensivity (if that is a word) because there are always more ways to see things, each of which can provide further education. So, your stricture not to confuse one’s fears with analysis is well placed, but not the only thing that may be said, because of course people’s fears also have an objective component. Yes, their fears will show them who they are, if they will pay attention, but there isn’t any difference in this than in any analysis of a situation: One hopes and one fears, and sees what happens. The one side is afraid of the destruction of certain safeguards. The other side is afraid of subterranean manipulation subverting popular will. They are not unreasonable fears. The danger is – as always – when fear swamps cool judgment and persuades it that fear is the only rational response.

Certainly we can see the indirect evidence of people always wanting to divide people into camps, presumably so that the situation can be manipulated. It seems to me that both camps see some of the same worrying problems, but they are prevented from joining to attack them constructively because analysis of the problem gets short-circuited by demonizing the presumptive villains behind the scenes.

Remember the Maharishi Effect. Remember the unbreakable connection of your non-3D components. Remember that All Is One. It isn’t hard to keep the world together, if that is your intent. Just don’t expect to enlighten the world to its own nature by some peaceful process, all love and light and never Sturm und Drang. As long as souls will coexist in 3D to work out their destiny, there will be contention and cooperation, strife and peace, triumph and tragedy. If you don’t set your heart of what is impossible, you won’t get it broken when what can’t be, isn’t. But if you live in faith that life is good, that all is well, you reap the reward of at least relative tranquillity.

And you guarantee being called escapist.

So what?

Oh, I agree, but still, there it is. Pretending a siege of Babylon is always in fashion as hard-headed common-sense. Seeing what is, is rarely in fashion.

Let’s not get to feeling sorry for ourselves.

Smiling. No. No reason to. Well, this is one of those sessions where I’ve done all the lifting. Nothing special to add?

Patience. Have patience with those who can’t see things as you do. You do not know but that you may change your mind, or may see things you don’t see at the moment. We don’t say you will; we say always, you may, so it is well to leave yourself allowance for it.

Okay. I get the feeling you have more to say, another time, and if I hadn’t run on so long, you might have said it here. But there’s always another time, until there isn’t. Till then.