Consciousness and awareness
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical
(Kindle Location 2081). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.
(Q) Bob asks a couple
of questions that I have more than an inkling of the answers to. Seems to me these are more or less what you
were asking in 2001-2001.
[(1) How is consciousness, which is nonphysical, connected
to a physical brain? Scientists have
demonstrated that when certain parts of the brain are stimulated, images and
words and events may appear (memories, I suppose). I have always thought that memories were part
of what we physicals call consciousness, as our 'awareness' can call them up
(pre-Alzheimer's of course) as part of what we call 'thinking'. How can consciousness manipulate the brain to
'park' those memories - through a chemical process or something else?
[(2) When 'Rita' was
in 3D, she spoke and thought in English.
She is communicating to us now, through Frank, in English or does she
just stimulate Frank's language so he writes the words in English? It's hard for us in 3D to imagine anything
without use of whatever language we use on this planet, so how does the use of
English, French, Swahili, etc., 'translate' over to the non-3D
consciousness? Do you 'think' and
communicate in a language over there, or is there an entirely different way to
communicate?"]
Care to comment? Or
do I have to make up something?
(A) You may make up
something, if you wish. the distinction
between people "making up something" and "receiving information"
is less than people suppose. It isn't
like it is a game of one pitching and another catching. (I omit consideration of situations in which
the intent is to deceive; I am talking about any person's process of
idea-reception. Bookmark this topic, if
you wish; it would be productive. It is
the difference between thinking something through and following chains of
association. It involves the temporary
group mind as an active if rarely suspected aspect of a person's consciousness.)
Now, to these specific questions. The first question, I am afraid I have to
say, indicates that Bob has not absorbed, or is not taking into consideration,
what has been said so far. Either that,
or he silently means "insofar as humans are concerned", but it
doesn't look like this latter is this case.
At any rate, here is my attempt to clarify the subject. I will answer the question as posed, and you
each may proceed to apply the general answer to human consciousness in
particular.
(Q) I am engaged in a
silent argument here, Rita. Doesn't
Bob's first sentence show that he means humans, or at least humans and anything
else that has a brain?
(A) Well, let us
proceed, and we'll see. He asks, you see, how consciousness connects to a
brain. I understand your thinking he is
asking a special case of connection, but I cannot accept the question as posed
without seeming to agree silently with several assumptions included equally
silently.
(Q) This reminds me
of your asking the guys, in our first session, how many we were speaking to,
and their throwing out the assumptions behind the question rather than giving
you an answer that would have been approximately true but would have reinforced
assumptions you didn't even know you were incorporating.
(A) I have more
sympathy now with their predicament then.
Perhaps my objection would become clearer if I were to
repeat the question substituting the word "gravity" for "consciousness",
or using "love". Can you see
that the question as posed is as if we had not had yesterday's discussion? It treats consciousness as specific rather
than a universal precondition of life - indeed of the existence of the
world. I will answer the question as
posed, but not in such a way as to lose the ground we gained so far.
So let me parse the question. In the first place, it would be truer to say
that consciousness is nonphysical and
physical in nature. It is not bound by
physical rules; however, it shapes
physical rules. It is not so much found in the physical world as comprises the physical world. It is not a thing or a condition; it is a
piece of what the world is made of. That
is why, as I said "yesterday", Bob's question can't be answered in
the way he would have wanted - scientists cannot examine what they cannot
isolate - at least, they can't understand what they are dealing with as long as
they misdefine it.
So, consciousness doesn't connect to a brain; it comprises
it. The brain - and all of physical
existence - is made of
consciousness. And that was my initial
hesitation that you picked up on, Frank.
Consciousness has no necessary connection to a brain. Not even within humans, but more broadly not
to clouds or soil or radioactive waste or orlon fibers. You tend to think of things having consciousness when it would be
more useful to think of them as expressions
of consciousness. They are all
coordinated - the world is held together - by the fact that one factor holding it holding it
together is this undivided consciousness.
... Now, there is a
difference between consciousness and human awareness, and I realize that this
is closer to what Bob means. But again,
the question seems to exist without reference to previous answers, which is not
good. I mean, it leads nowhere to
consider these questions as if in isolation from previous answers. It is in the drawing of connections that a
new way of seeing the world will emerge for you. If you do not draw the connection - it cannot
be done on your behalf; it requires that you work at it - if you do not draw
the connections and feel your way to inferences, this will be not an exploration
but, in effect, idle speculation that nowhere touches your real life. For, if you do work to absorb the material and thus change how you see the
world, even if you wind up rejecting the new construct, it will have moved you
to a new understanding. But first you must have worked with the
material. That is your safety valve,
you see; it is less the specific information than the general reorientation
that is being presented, and less the reorientation than the temporary or
permanent expansion of the ideas that, for you comprise the world. This can only take place if you work. This is not a science fiction story to be
enjoyed and forgotten.
(Q) I well remember
how your life and mine were transformed by the material we brought forth in our
sessions.
(A) Yes, and as it
turned out, even the things that unsettled me and left me wondering if I knew
anything, were of great value. In fact,
I might almost say that was the
value. But, to continue.
There is a demonstrable link, of course, between the
physical matter of the brain and access to any particular memory. But is just as was explained to us, the
difference between access and location, although actually I need to say more
about that, more than "the guys" were able to get across to us
because we were only in the first stages of absorbing their concept of access
points.
(Q) I am going to
recommend - in fact, I am doing it now - that people find that part in The Sphere and the Hologram. Maybe I will look it up, and if I can find
it, I will insert it here.
The switching mechanism
[And here it is, from material received in Rita's and my
2001-2001 sessions. First of two transcripts:]
"(Q) I've been
want to ask the guys about this. We
understand that there's now quite good scientific evidence that our
consciousness does not seem to reside in the brain or in the physical
body. There's now interest in the same
question with respect to memory. Do you
have any comment you'd like to make about that?
(TGU) Well it's all
the same thing. You're looking in matter
for things that are not material, and you're not going to find them. Given that the organizing principle for the
whole body is outside of the physical, and the physical is laid down on energy
patterns that are set from beyond the physical, it would be foolish for us to
then entrust a vital part of the mechanism to a physical place, when it's
already in a nonphysical place.
The circulation of your blood is a physical function. The storing of your memories is not entirely a physical function. The accessing of the memories is more physical
than anything else, but the actual storing of them is not. Just as with your consciousness, the
accessing of your consciousness is partly
physical. If you have a brain injury
(even though that's also an energetic injury), you could look at it as a
physical injury that may make it impossible for you to access memories or
abilities that you had prior to the injury.
But when you drop the body, you'll find that all of those abilities and
memories are still there on call, because they weren't destroyed. They were never in the physical in the first
place. Your access to them was destroyed, or damaged, but not the actual
abilities or memories. This is why some
of you have been surprised that people with extensive head injuries who were
given sympathetic and loving attention over long periods of time regained
abilities that had been thought to be lost.
They learned new pathways to something which was invulnerable because it
wasn't in the physical."
"(Q) All right,
can you talk about the process - it's important for us, these days - about
losing memories as we age.
(TGU): Well again,
you aren't losing the memories, you're losing the access to the memories. The memories are as they are, as you would
find were you to have an operation and have them open your brain and touch
portions of the brain with the needles.
They've done that for years, they know that they are there. But it isn't that that particular piece of the
brain is exactly the memory; it's more like that particular piece of the brain
is the doorkeeper to the memory. A
subtle difference, but it is a big one."
"(Q) So
something has happened with respect to the antenna that picks up the external
information?
(TGU) The switching
mechanism, we would say. Like a
telephone exchange. It could be that
portions of the lobes that are the gateways no longer function, and it's as if
the memories are gone. But ordinarily
it's that the switching function is inhibited, and can be restored sometimes;
and when the switching function is restored, it's found that, lo and behold,
the memories were there all along. You
see, there are two things going on. The
switching function, on the one hand, that enables you to access the places in
the physical gateways, which then access the memories, and on the other hand,
the gateways themselves.
So if the gateway cell, shall we say, is destroyed, then
there may not be any access to memory, although perhaps another one can be
developed. Or, if the switching system
fails to access the cell that's perfectly good, still you've lost your
access. In neither case has the memory
been lost absolutely; it's all there, as you would say, in the Akashic record -
which ought to tell you that it's there in the first place. It hasn't been so much transferred from the
physical as stored, in the first place, in the nonphysical."
[End first transcript.]
[Second transcript, which, I notice, uses the word
"consciousness" more in the way we use it every day, from a session
in the black box in which Rita was acting as monitor while Skip worked the
machinery:]
"(Q) Skip has a
question here for me to ask. He's
asking, what is the equivalent of the switching system when you leave the body?
(TGU) Well, you see,
when you leave the body, you don't need the switching system in just that way,
because that switching system is necessary because you're living in
time-slices. You're going blip, blip, blip,
blip, and so there is a sequence.
There's a limitation on your consciousness, which is that it can only
hold so many things in consciousness at the same time, and your consciousness
really does sort of have to move moment to moment, to stay in the same place. Once you're outside of the time-slice
problem; and once you're outside of moving, moment to moment, to stay with a
sliding present, you don't have that same situation, and then it's more like
the crystal analogy that we gave you a long time ago, in which we said that the
volume of the crystal has innumerable places in it, all of which
interconnect. They don't move; it just
depends on which way you shine your flashlight.
Did that answer the question? Your switching system is because your
consciousness is required to hold things together while you're moving from
moment to moment in the present. That is
to say, while the present is moving around you and you are staying up with it."
[End of transcript from The
Sphere and the Hologram]
[Rita, resuming]
(A) "The
guys" were making an incomplete and only approximately accurate statement
because often - especially with new material - that is the best that can be
done. The actual memories reside in what
people call the Akashic record, in that everything that occurs - whether
seemingly physical or seemingly mental or seemingly emotional (as if any of
those could exist in isolation) - is automatically recorded there. In a sense it could be said to occur there, because that
"record" is not separate from life but is life.
However, that last point aside, our brains - human brain
tissue contains access points that allow us to access the memory, but those
access points are more like local copies of the original than like independent
replications.
(Q) I don't
understand that last statement.
(A) If you consider
the brain tissue that connect to the memory, realize that if it were quite that
simple -
Hmm, this requires a longer discussion than we should begin
toward the end of a session. I will
resume with that in our next meeting.
Meanwhile, let me wrap up other aspects of that first question by saying,
again, that consciousness is not a quality, to be included or not included
depending on what we're considering.
Consciousness is part of everything.
Note: I did not say everything is a part of consciousness,
but consciousness is a part of everything, in the same way one might say either
"humans are spiritual in nature" or "spirits having human
experiences" and come up with a different meaning.
