More from Frank DeMarco

The Nature of Time

Aside:  Julian Barbour (time capsules)

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 850-852). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(A) Time exists, in the sense of a separation of states. But as said previously, time itself, as opposed to time intermingled with various vaguely perceived or unperceived or misperceived aspects of higher dimensions, is not the same thing.

Remember and apply if you can—there is no “here” and “there”; “this side” and “the other side.” Reality is whole and undivided. Remembering this will help you fight the mental temptation to create fantasies of life “over there.” Logic and emotion both, but in different forms, will try to build defensible models. If you but remember that “this world” is “that world,” that “this side” is “the other side,” you will see that you are not dealing with two realms with different rules, so much as different perceptions depending on the state of being of the perceiver. As a rule, dropping the body marks a significant shift in perception. Therefore it appears as an all-but-absolute boundary between two realms. If you can remember that it is not two realms but one, things will gradually clarify. I feel like I am beating this to death, and I’m sure some people will agree, but it is one thing to intellectually assent, and a very different thing to get it. Some time pondering, free-associating, daydreaming about the ramifications if there is only one world, rather than two, will help seat the concept.

Our Experience of Time

(Q)  … saying, “Is there time?” 

(A)  Separation of states, rather, as I said. Let me explain.

(Q)  Well, I should hope so!

(A)  You are familiar with the humorously stated “Time is what stops everything from happening at once.” There is truth to that, said indirectly, which is pretty nearly the only way it can be said. An analogous statement is, “Space is what keeps everything from happening in the same place,” which may make it easier for some people to understand the previous statement.

The conditions of 3D life make it easier to intuitively understand the nature of time by comparing it to the nature of space, because space does not include the element of compulsion that time does when experienced in 3D. Unless you are in a vehicle being driven by someone else who is inflexible in sticking to a route you have had no say in determining, you never experience space in the way you always experience time. That is one reason why people who have an experience of life on the other side return reporting that, “On the other side, there is no time.” It would be a bit more accurate to say, “On the other side there is no compulsion, no compulsory movement of time in a given direction.”

…  In 3D life there is no compulsion to proceed in one geographical direction, at an invariant pace. Instead, you have freedom to move around, change directions, hurry or lag or stay still. Time in 3D offers you none of these freedoms, and so referring to your experience of spatial movement may be an easy way to hint at the nature of life within time when time does not have the element of silent remorseless compulsion.

Again, remember. There is no “other side” per se. There is one reality, the same reality you partake of when in the body, but perceived differently. It isn’t that the nature of time changes; it is that the way we live in time changes. It is that our experience of time changes.

(Q)  …  think of successive moments in time as existing next to one another. They were not only telling us that all moments of time exist; they were saying why!

(A)  That’s right. If you could envision moments of time arrayed like any geographical analogy you care to use—city blocks, one leading to the next, say, or trees in a woods—you could see that moving from one street or tree to another doesn’t destroy the one you left, or bring into being the next one you come to. But if something were forcing you along a straight-line route, with no return possible, it would seem like it.

And—this may be important to some—the first step in overcoming the illusion that past time ceases to exist and future time comes into being is to envision the possibility. In our day—your day now, I suppose I should say—it no longer serves to say “on the other side there is no time” because it provides no image or even concept for the busy mind to grasp and gnaw. New explanations for new circumstances, and new times are always providing these new circumstances.

Again, to force a picture into fewer dimensions is to either distort it or—with luck and application—invent or employ the equivalent of the technique of perspective.

So—to go back a few paragraphs—separation of states. Envision all moments of time as snapshots, arrayed in the order they were experienced. If that is my world now, it is your world now. In other words, for it to be true where the distortions of physical existence are removed, it must have been true all along, regardless how it was perceived at the time.

Even that last sentence, “at the time,” should make it more obvious that life isn’t the way it is experienced, ...

…  The difficulty—one difficulty of many!—is that what I am asking you to do contains a contradiction. I say, envision an array of snapshots, yet each “snapshot” is not a snapshot but is itself a movie, or so it has to appear to you in the body (“within time” as they say) because otherwise you can’t get a sense of movement. If life is a series of still photos, how can any of the photos differ? In other words, where does the possibility of movement come in?

(Q)  Yes, I have felt that question, not quite so clearly.

(A)  Zeno the stoic posed it long ago in his conundrum about Achilles being unable to pass the turtle because at any moment in time he is still x amount behind it, even if a diminishing amount.

(Q)  I never could look at that as any more than playing with words and with logic.

(A)  He wasn’t attempting to persuade you that a man can’t catch a turtle, but that the way we perceive time must be faulty.

(Q)  So how do you resolve that paradox? I can sense time as a series of stills that do not go out of existence. I can’t quite see how—in that analogy or description—anything can change.

(A)  The answer is that the pictures don’t change, the observer brings the perception of change by movement over the pictures.

(Q)  Oh!

(A)  Connects a couple of dots, does it?

(Q)  Can I try? Let’s say that when all-that-is sprang into existence (a puzzle in itself, but we’ll look at that later, I hope) all possibilities exist, as I have often parroted, thinking I understood. Let’s say they exist as an array of cards, each a slightly different situation. The observer/experiencer/person-in-3D chooses to hop from card to card in whatever direction he or she chooses at any given moment—any given subjective moment choosing among objective moments, I guess, which is how we “create our own reality.” It is how we choose what we will become. It is how we can create the mind or soul that can become a strand in another later on—that is, next in line subjectively. This implies different levels of—

Whew, too much to hold.

(A)  Yet it was easier for you to put that out without having to ascribe it to me or to any external mind, thus removing one layer of difficulty.

(Q)  Would you sum it up and/or correct it, then?

(A)  The critical insight is the realization that there are two pieces to the puzzle. One is the “objective” situation—the endless array of potential moments, or, to be more careful, the endless array of moments that may potentially be experienced. The other is the “subjective” experiencer. Without the two, it can only be static, not dynamic. It is the ability to choose that creates the unique pattern, and that must be at a different level, or it would be enmeshed in whatever moment.

(Q)  Take that, Zeno!

(A)  Nonetheless, you owe him a debt, or would if his paradox had been the factor that enlightened you to the situation. You haven’t really grasped the nature of it, nor need you. But a certain kind of logic-driven mind may find it a potential exit from the trap of appearances.

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 952-957). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

One reality, not two

(A)  …  One world, inhabited in common by physical and nonphysical alike, because of course any being must inhabit all and not [only] some dimensions of reality.

But inhabiting a dimension is not the same as being aware of it. What seems shadowy or nonexistent to one set of awareness will be firm and obvious to another, and vice-versa. The physical world as you experience experience it—the densest part of reality—is but shadow to those whose awareness centers in more rarified dimensions. Similarly, the nonphysical world as I am experiencing it is solid and definite to us, shadowy to you.

The fact that it is one reality, not two, helps explain—or will when you consider it—why those in the physical can “visit” nonphysical reality and vice-versa. Have you ever thought that, in a sense, nonphysical presences on the denser plane are ghostly—and so are physical presences on the nonphysical?

(Q) …  The characters in a TV show or movie or novel are almost more real to me than these departed souls. Time is an enormous barrier.

(A)  No bigger than space, but you can traverse space. And you can learn to traverse time/space by way of the higher dimensions—what do you think you are doing here? Communicating with me is communicating beyond time-space; it is transcending time-space. And yet it is but little different from communicating with yourself.

(Q)  Because we are all one.

(A)  Yes, all one. The shorthand description is that all the strands ultimately interconnect. It’s just a matter of—well, actually, that is yet another long topic, though a fascinating one. I could never quite see it, in the body; too many concepts to unlearn. But we’ll get to it, only not today.

A change in consciousness

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 1058-1145). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(A)  What do I do? Remember what we have to keep in mind: Who is “I”? Not the apparent unit you (and I!) knew in the body, but more like a community of reaction-systems bound by a will that was formed and exercised during the lifetime, which may be said to be the real accomplishment of the lifetime. That is, the components existed separately before the incarnation. It was the controller of the newly assembled bundle that was added, and what was that controller but the will, the ring that bound them? But outside of the very specific 3D conditions of existence, the relationship changes. The various strands, though continuing to be associated, function more autonomously (because not tightly bound by one controlling consciousness in a limiting environment). The extensions in all directions—

Let’s begin that sentence again. While in the body, the community making up the individual functioned more as one individual, isolated from everybody else, than it does outside 3D, where consciousness no longer limits.

(Q)  Let me try to rephrase that. I think I know what you want to say, and you can correct whatever I get wrong. I think you mean, all the strands always connect to their previous lives (put it that way) whether in body or not, but while in the body, they can function only in the background unless called to consciousness. Once you are outside of time-space, without having to deal with the constrictions of 3D, those strands and their extensions in many directions increase in relative strength—that is, they are more prominent in your new consciousness. [Typing this up, it occurs to me that what I said was only from the point of view of the former individual. Those strands, viewed from other points of view, may seem entirely different.]

(A)  That’s all right. Now let me rephrase it, not to correct—for it is a correct statement as far as it goes—but to provide triangulation.  “I” being now outside the body, need not exist, as I did in 3D, with a limited intense field of consciousness. Need not, can not. Conditions do not allow it. Instead I inhabit a far wider consciousness, correspondingly less intense except under stimulation from 3D contact or other things that we cannot go into now. Therefore my self-definition is different. “I” am not the same as the Rita you knew, or, no, put it this way—I, as I experience myself, am not the same as I experienced myself in 3D. Therefore I am aware of things I didn’t know in the body, and I react differently. Remember when you were told that what Jung called the unconscious was in many ways a definition of the guys upstairs?

(Q)  Not specifically. I remember having had the thought.

(A)  Well, it would be closer to say his unconscious—be it the personal unconscious or the racial unconscious or other levels we can’t discuss here without going off-track—are more or less the strands that connect us in all directions.

So when you think you are talking to Rita, you are and you aren’t. You are, because everything you know of her is here; you aren’t, because the vast bulk of the iceberg that was hidden from you in life—“past-life” connections, etc.—is actively participating.

Can you see why you were told (well, Rita was told, through your voice) that “we relate”? We relate on so many levels—

We relate to all levels of ourselves, and that can stand some explication.

Consider the levels involved. First, of course—or maybe not “of course”; perhaps you never thought of it—

Let’s put it this way. Think in terms of ever-widening spheres of influence. First is the specific bundle of strands that was “assembled” to create Rita. (And by the way, I see that we didn’t have the threads and traits description quite right, mingling two different kinds of things. Later we can untangle that.) Those strands, that spent a lifetime functioning as part of a community functioning as a unit, continue to relate to one another as they did, but, as I said, under changed circumstances. They are less constrained, more equal now that there is not the inherent bias provided by a limited field of consciousness.

(Q)  Meaning only so much could be held in mind at any given time.

(A)  Meaning much more than that. But let me briefly finish the sketch of spheres of influence. First, those that were the most active strands in the lifetime; then, those plus the strands that were relatively or entirely inactive during the lifetime. Then, all that plus—gradually, as fast as one can absorb it or as fast as one chooses to absorb it—wider and wider ripples, because of course every strand that had a life connects thereby to other strands with which it is in intimate unbreakable connection. And so on and so forth, for no matter how far you extend the chains, there is more beyond, and who can absorb all the connections available to creation?

Not all those strands were human. Not all were even the kind of animal life as, say, whales. Some lived in other places, for Earth is not the only field.

So, consider what an unending research project, or extended foreign travel, or pen-pal correspondence, it is to be outside of 3D’s constrictions but still aware of what they were.

(Q)  I knew you were on extended research, which you once told me was your idea of endless fun.

(A)  I don’t believe I said “endless fun” in so many words—but it is!

Bridges, not moments

(A)  …  Let’s continue with the first set of definitions to be held in mind—who is the “I” or the “you” being considered? I provided you a hint about our consciousnesses as connectors, able to follow links to other communities of experience (which is how an individual may seem to us). But now let’s return to the part of me that more closely resembles the Rita you knew—the bundle that was born, lived, made connections, developed habits, interacted, thought, studied, daydreamed, did a million practical day-by-day things, and died. We have said that that part of me survives, and I suspect that this is what Charles, for one, expected to hear about.

(Q)  I think I’m with you so far. You could be considered in your most expanded form—all the network that was used to fashion the nucleus of your Rita-mind and life—or in that Rita aspect considered as if separate.

(A)  Not quite “as if” separate. It is separate—only separation isn’t what it seems in 3D. It is a way of looking at things, not an actual barrier. Other than that caveat, though, close enough. When you consider the unit of consciousness that knew itself as Rita, you are closer to what you used to hear as “in-process Rita,” to be distinguished from “completed Rita.”

(Q)  I understood that to be a distinction between our consciousness at any given moment—age 35, say—and the overall view the consciousness attained once it had gotten the complete picture.

(A)  Remember, the concepts we were given then—like the concepts I hope to provide now—are not designed as monuments but as bridges. They are to help you move from wherever you are at the beginning to a more sophisticated understanding.

(Q)  Edging toward understanding A by understanding B, and vice-versa.

(A)  Yes. You may find it inspiring or depressing, depending upon your temperament, but there is always more to learn, always redefinition of what you had previously made yours. Always, unless and until you choose stability over growth, at which time learning ceases until you are ready to proceed once again.

(Q)  And I’m getting the feeling that neither choice is somehow wrong.

(A)  Not at all. Eternal life is a marathon, not a sprint, to use one of your analogies. Different people need to take breathers at different times.

So, your previous understandings are to be refined—some of them, to the point that you may feel them being overthrown, rather than refined. But that is the way to new understanding.

Orientations

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 1139-1196). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(A)  All right, “in-process” versus “completed.” Those concepts were put into place as place-holders, you might say. They allowed us to save the phenomena without having to delve into labyrinthine complexities. But now that your base of understanding has jelled and matured, we can go back and redefine what served.

It is true that every moment—and thus every moment’s mind, consciousness, experience, awareness, state of being, interim status—continues to exist forever. That is what the Akashic record is. It isn’t the annals of what happened year by year, though it would serve as such. It is, rather, the substance of the life of every moment. You appreciate the distinction? It isn’t merely a record; it is the actual moment. All of them, from every viewpoint (or rather—well, that’s too long a digression. Maybe another time.)

To use another of your analogies. Reality is a CD-ROM, recording all possibilities as it is created. No. Let’s start again, that has too many misleading nuances.

It is a common mistake to think that reality came into being and is created moment by moment. Rather, it came into being and is experienced moment by moment, decision by decision. Your decisions participate in the creation of the version of reality you will live. The unchosen paths exist equally as those chosen, but in the version you experience they aren’t activated, let us say. In effect, they might as well not exist. You see them not, nor experience them and their unchosen consequences.

Nonetheless, they exist, and another path through the same reality, making different choices, will experience a different reality. Different in effect, not intrinsically.

So, people’s past-life reviews show them the life they created by their choices and the effects that followed. It shows, sometimes (depending on the person’s receptivity) the life they might have created by different choices.

And now you will ask, why don’t these people also experience their extended being? The answer is, who are you talking about? If you refer to the extended being from which they were created in the first place, certainly it is no less aware than it has ever been. But if you refer to the specific mind created during that life-experience, it may or may not be aware—it depends upon the level of awareness it attained. And this is not to be taken as a “greater than” or “lesser than” comparison. It is more a matter of the composition of elements, that render the mind more aware, or less, of any particular phase of existence. After all, none of us comprehend the whole. (And I mean to use the word “comprehend” to mean “extend to” as well as “understand.”) There may be no particular advantage in Davy Crockett being a mystic, for example, or, say, Lucretia Mott.

Small side-trail. You tend to think of these laboriously created minds as if their primary purpose were to relate to 3D life. But in a way, it would be more accurate to say that 3D life is created to allow for the formation of such minds which then are available for interaction on “higher planes,” or “the other side,” or “heaven and hell.”

So, to return, if you were to contact a mind in its 3D-orientation (that is, without conscious connection to the rest of itself) you would be told of it experiencing eternal life one way; another, equally 3D-oriented but with that orientation containing an active link to the “nonphysical”—such as you, such as myself, such as anyone whose life included that dimension—would report an entirely different experience. The difference is not in the reporting nor in the terrain, of course; it is in the mind doing the experiencing.

Regardless of the nature and extent of the mind you contact, the answer to “what are you doing?” is going to be—relating. If I am experiencing my afterlife only from within the mind I created, and that mind has no wider, deeper connections because I did not concern myself with such matters, maybe I will report that I have been to Sunday School at my accustomed church; or perhaps I have been attending classes or teaching class, at my accustomed university; or I am having Sunday dinner with the family I grew up in, or the family I formed. You get the idea. Whatever interested that mind in its 3D lifetime will probably interest it afterward, until it is interested no longer. (Topic for another time: How do people cease to be interested? Clue: They are still connected “upstairs” as you say, and that connection still gives hints.)

And this is not mere putting-in-time.  Real, constructive, work is being done by people continuing their living in different circumstances. They were fashioned—to some degree self-fashioned—to do just that, after all. Someone fascinated with mechanics doesn’t have to lose the fascination just because the limited 3D framework has been suddenly (or gradually) experienced as wider and deeper than had been thought. There is nothing more (or less) important about metaphysical speculation than about an appreciation of leverage and inertia and the other phenomena of 3D existence. After all, you have Hemingway going fishing in his afterlife, do you not? He knows he is creating, he creates in such a way as to allow a wide range of outcomes, and he continues to experience as if he were still in 3D, only by his choice and according to parameters he sets. And still he continues to function on other levels, as he did in life. (I might almost say, “because he did in life.”)

Past Life Reviews

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 1271-1274). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  Rita said she did not go through a life review but she regained access. She said this would be another thread to follow up on at another time. So . . . what does she mean by regaining access?

(A) …  I think the question may be based on a misapprehension. I meant merely, the same process looks different depending upon the context from which it is considered.

What looks like a past-life review, when seen as an extension of physical conditions as you have always experienced them, will look like a process, a sequential process: First you look at this, then this, then this. NDE reports can be read that way without either the experiencer or the reader realizing that such a report is a reinterpretation into familiar sequential-time terms of a process that did not actually occur in that way.

What I myself experienced was the same thing in effect, but I realize that it is more accurate to say that rather than my being shown something, I regained access to something I had never been separated from.

Let’s put it this way. We are put into an Earth-life, and we are both a continuing entity and, at the same time, a new entity. Beginning from a pool of potential elements, a relative few are selected to live together in one body, fusing themselves into a new soul, or a new mind, or a new center of localized consciousness.

If you examine that life from the point of view of the elements that comprised it, you will see a long string of “past lives” (not necessarily on Earth) and a long evolution of the soul.

If you examine it from the point of view of the particular mixture that became a new element, you will see a beginning of consciousness, a growth of a sense of self, and a living-out of life in relative isolation from all the other elements that are equally part of it, but that did not manifest with it as part of its particular mixture whose 3D experience was to fuse a new center, a new mind or soul.

The circumstances are the same. It is the appearances that are different. It is the conscious and unconscious context of the viewing (and the report) that may make it appear like two different things.

Now, when we come to die—when we come to move beyond the internal division between things known to the earthbound portion and things known to the entire being of which the earthbound portion is one part—our own assumptions at the time we pass over may color how we experience the transition, in the same way that assumptions color any experience, mostly unconsciously, so that to us it seems we get an objective report. If you expect to cross the River Jordan and see Jesus, you will, and that perception won’t be “wrong,” it won’t be “nonobjective.” It will be an interpretation shaped by expectations—and this is always so. That’s why, incidentally, people who believe in nothing [that is, believe that nothing follows 3D life] sometimes initially meet blankness. For as long as their soul-perspective governs their perception, they get what they expect to get. Only when the overall being, what you have called the “larger being,” feeds its perspective does the returning new soul have its horizons broadened.

By the way, that is the retrieval process, though we never thought of it that way. When we in the physical extended to others no longer in the body who were “stuck” or bewildered, what we were doing was getting their attention, true enough, so that they could break out of their unconscious self-imposed isolation. What we didn’t realize was that the “helpers” or the unnamed forces behind our scenarios were actually that person’s own larger community opening the person’s perceptions. What we saw was a soul reacting to a scenario and responding — “seeing the light,” in a word. But what we didn’t necessarily see — I never did, anyway — was that the person wasn’t “going somewhere new,” even metaphorically, but was handing over perception to a broader consciousness of which they were a part. Establishing diplomatic relations with the previously unsuspected rest of themselves, so to speak.

I did not go over expecting to see Jesus, or needing to see relatives or friends. My few days of coma provided me with a smooth transition of consciousness. But whether it had been smooth or not, my transition would have been the same process of moving from a limited to a less-limited perspective. As I knew what was coming, I didn’t have to experience it in sequential fashion. I had been relatively closed off and then I was not.

(Q)  I think you are meaning that this is the same for everybody, not that you were relatively closed off as opposed to relatively open during your life.

(A)  Correct. I am explaining as clearly as I can—even a bit pedantically, I am afraid—that my “past-life review,” like anyone’s, was merely a matter of greater awareness as I moved beyond the constrictions of the physical part of the universe.

But bear in mind that this is still a simplified picture that does not convey various differences in effective consciousness caused by the change of terrain. Our new circumstances lead us to experience ourselves in very different ways, and it is this usually unspoken context that leads to so many misinterpretations.

For instance, while in the body, perhaps mostly unaware of “past-life” connections or nonphysical connections of any kind, one may live thinking oneself a unit comprising only 3D elements. But our opinions about ourselves do not change who we are, what we are. It doesn’t matter that you think yourself an orphan in the universe. You aren’t and couldn’t be. You were created, you came into being, as a unique combination of elements that were to learn to live together, you were continually affected by internal adjustments among various elements, you expressed inherited traits not only from your physical heredity but from your nonphysical heredity as well. You were less a unit than a family learning to become a unit, and each member of that family brought along its own heritage, which is why your life was a unique window into existence.

Well, you need to keep this unvarying fact in mind when you consider any other aspect of life, either physical or nonphysical. To the degree that you keep it in your mind as background, your perception of new aspects will be clarified. And this gradual process of clarification, incidentally, is why these things take time and perseverance to sink in.

(Q)  It is, yet again, that old “to understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B you have to understand A.”

(A)  Yes it is. Coming to truth is a continuing process of refinement [of understanding]. You don’t leap toward a greater truth; you edge toward it, clarifying our perception. (That doesn’t mean you don’t suddenly make a great stride. It merely means that becoming clearer is a process rather than a destination or event.)

(Q)  In the past, I have noticed that some people thought my reference to the larger being of which we are a part meant that I was finding a new way to say “God” without using the word God. I don’t know that I was ever able to persuade them that I was saying something different from what they expected, and so they weren’t actually hearing what I was saying, but were cramming it into their accustomed ways of thinking.

(A)  All you can do is explain as best you can what you are meaning to say. No one can guarantee understanding of what they say: Communication requires two things, expression and reception. Express as carefully as you are able, and leave the rest to your audience. People take what they need, which isn’t always the same thing you said or intended to say. Nothing wrong with that — remember, their other elements may be seizing on things as a clue for the person, and so may be very opportunistic.

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 1334-1340). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

Levels of consciousness

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 1350-1356). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  Rita says, ‘We’ are put into an Earth-life, and we are both a continuing entity and, at the same time, a new entity. Beginning from a pool of potential elements, a relative few are selected to live together in one body, fusing themselves into a new soul, or a new mind, or a new center of localized ‘consciousness.’ I’m realizing much more clearly that any answer depends entirely on which ‘level’ of consciousness is doing the perceiving. From the perspective of the continuing entity or the strands, how do they communicate, select the few that are chosen, fuse themselves and decide on a body for a ‘new entity’?

(A)  The question is rooted in time, of course. It assumes process and sequence and — most of all — assumes separation in a way that is not quite appropriate. In higher dimensions, or “the other side,” we don’t have meetings, exactly. Yet it would not be accurate to say we all function as one undifferentiated person. “Person” is a term best confined to discussions of life in the 3D realm.

The short answer — which will be merely cryptic until we can provide the context — is that no level of consciousness decides its own state of being. Our lives are always guided and shaped by the next higher level of consciousness, which is itself shaped by its next higher level of consciousness, and so on and so forth.

No one pulls himself up by his own bootstraps.

Now, those few sentences have provided you with material for many a question, if you ponder them, as I encourage you to do. The process of pondering — a combination of active thinking and receptive musing — allows new meanings to suggest themselves. It is a richer means of absorbing new ideas than mere logic and certainly more than mere memorization.

Let me return to the point I made earlier. Life is not divided between the physical and the nonphysical. We do not move from one side to the other. We do not cease to exist in one realm and appear in another, though it certainly appears that way. We live in all existing dimensions, because there is no other way it can be. You can’t live in depth but not in width or height.

Ponder the relevance of this statement to the question posed.

Now, return to another statement, the connection but differentiation among different levels of consciousness. You as the controlling consciousness are in charge of your body. You coordinate the society of cells; your central intelligence provides the stability for the system. All the specialized functions that cooperate to continue your life—respiration, elimination, digestion, the electrical and chemical homeostatic systems—all depend upon you as the linchpin, even though your conscious life knows nothing of the everyday functioning and interaction of these subsystems.

You are, in essence, a higher self, or larger being, to all these more specialized intelligences. Your life is of a different order, your everyday concerns are incomprehensible to them.

Why should you expect it to be any different between you as a time-bound, 3D-bound individual element and the next higher level of intelligence that is to you as you are to the parasympathetic system?

Could you read the New York Times to your liver or lung intelligence system? Could the mind that filters your blood profit from reading the financial section? Could it even have any idea what it was about?

This sounds whimsical. It is not. It is a statement through which you can better understand the very true statement: “As above, so below.” That does not apply only to the relationship between human life and the placement of the stars. It refers to the fact that everything in the universe is scaled. Everything is a repetition in miniature or in magnification of every other layer. Levels of being do not change the fact that all life is one pattern, scaled differently but scaled to the same pattern.

You may give intellectual assent too quickly. In practice that will have the same effect as instant rejection — it will leave your life untouched. To make these concepts yours, you must wrestle with them, argue their ramifications, test whether you can really understand and assent to them as you see them manifest in your life. So, go back. Ponder.

Meanwhile, remember the question and try to tie it together with two concepts—connected but different levels of consciousness, and stewardship.

Higher intelligence

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 1389-1396). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

What makes you think that at any level, the components decide what comes next? Your experience of life shows you that you are responsible for acting and reacting. They do not show you that you are responsible for producing the events (call them that) that produce the need to choose. It is true that you create yourself moment to moment (and thus cumulatively) by what you choose. It is somewhat true that you bring things to your life by what you are. It is wholly untrue that you shape the circumstances that are the larger framework of the pattern. You do not cause the sun to rise or set. You do not cause or select the millions of social interactions that shape your world moment by moment.

Yet clearly, life is not chaos. What can all this mean, save that the order in life is provided by a higher intelligence that functions at a different level? I mean to say that the layer of consciousness that produces the conditions among which you live is essentially different from yours in the same way that yours is different from the intelligence that directs your lower functions. You cannot read its New York Times, either.

Now, in all this, it is important to remember, I am not drawing the distinction people often erroneously make between a layer of consciousness while in 3D and our layer outside 3D. That is a false distinction.  We in the higher dimensions (and that is a clumsy and misleading way to put it) are at the same layer of consciousness as you who center in the 3D world. We are the same level of consciousness, but functioning in different conditions.

You don’t become a lung-mind and you don’t become a god-mind by dropping the body. You remain what you were, but your sphere of awareness expands. Is that as clear to you as to me?

I know that people describe life planning and past-life review and meetings to decide what to work on next, and, looking in hindsight, the process can look that way. But is that really the most accurate description? Did you enter life knowing your plan, etc.? And — since you didn’t — why is it that a 3D life always appears to clarify out of a mist so to speak? Even the children who remember “past lives” themselves merge from a mist, unless they are close continuations of a “previous” intelligence (often one whose life was cut short by design or choice or accident) that carries through, rather than a new mixture of ingredients.

This is somewhat shorter than usual, but it has taken you an hour to bring it through, and I suggest that it will provide fodder for several more questions, so may be a good place to pause.

Soulmaking

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 1417). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  The material prompted some thought on the transition period.  I understand broadly what Rita is saying about going from the limited 3D perspective to a broader perspective of some sort of collective soul.  I found myself wondering just how [my] personality and collection of experiences, beliefs, work, etc., is perceived ‘over there’ in the nonphysical realm.  Does one maintain all those memories and personality traits as [me], or is one more of a conglomeration of everyone’s experiences in the so-called ‘collective’ of past lives, other soul parts and their experiences, etc.?  In other words, more specifically, how does one perceive oneself on the other side and how do others perceive the former earthbound “you”?

(A)  A good clarifying question, and the answer is just the kind of “yes but no” answer we used to get, or, not “yes but no”, but more like “either and both”.

Back in our sessions, early on, we were told that guys regarded our minds as little more than habit systems, and I don’t remember ever pursuing that very vigorously.  So perhaps now is as good a time as any.

The whole point of creating a soul in a given time and place, comprising certain traits and predispositions, is to create an enduring resource; so, when successful, there would be no point in throwing the elements back in the soup!  A point of view, an accustomed collaboration of elements in a new container, is an accomplishment.  It is valued.  Certainly [you] will continue to be [you] as, for instance, I continue to be Rita and all those past lives people connect to on occasion continue to be themselves.  No need to fear dissolution!  However, that isn’t the end of the story, because the opposite – or what seems to be an opposite – is also true.  In effect, we are all one; in effect, we are all individuals.  So, if you ask for some specific information, it is the equivalent of doing a “search”.  The information is here, and if it is here, it is available.  (The limits on information are on the 3D receptor’s end, not on this end.)

I am not yet sure what you mean by “specifically”.  I recognize that you don’t wish to be fobbed off with generalities, but I don’t know what else you want.  I am of course willing to clarify or expand if you can let me know what you have in mind.

Meanwhile, these thoughts on the subject.  Has it occurred to any of you yet that this question, and things I have said already, provide a good deal of clarification into the process of soulmaking?

Take the word “traits” and substitute “minds” or “lives” or “past lives” or “other related minds” and see how this sentence reads:

A new soul is created by the combination of many past traits into one time and place and genetic structure.

I am tempted to sit back and say, “Do you see?” – and if I were in a classroom, that is what I would be inclined to do, for anything reasoned out by oneself is more permanent and definite than something presented by another. … here are the implications I want you to get.

Everyone on Earth (that is, in 3D) may be considered a community of certain past individuals.

Everyone is thus a recapitulation of what has gone before.  This will need to be filled in

The mental world in 3D as well as beyond it is thus made continually more complex and attains more possibilities because any combination of previous elements has greater potential for complexity.

This is why change is a continually accelerating process.  With each iteration, the building blocks are more complex, so the resulting new entity can become yet more complex.

As was said earlier, time experienced as chronology matters.  You can’t tear down the pyramids before they were constructed.  You can’t use simple lives as building blocks until they have come into existence, nor can you be used until you have come into existence.

This, by the way, or perhaps not so “by the way”, is the truth behind evolution.  It is not that things continually get “better”, whatever “better” means.  It is that things build on prior things, resulting in ever greater possibilities.

Your soul’s heredity

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 1483). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  You said, “Everyone is thus a recapitulation of what has gone before.  This will need to be filled in.”

(A)  Let’s use you as an example, although the detail isn’t right.  You were formed in 1946, of certain materials.  (And this will enable me to clarify a few things left over from our sessions when I was the inquirer rather than the encyclopedia.)

Your physical heredity is from your genetic heritage from your parents (and, by extension, from their families, emphasized for many previous generations but theoretically including heredity from the first person, that is, forever).

Your cultural heredity is from the environment you are placed in.  This includes not only physical surroundings but intellectual and perceptual and emotional influences.

(Q)  I know what you mean (I can feel it) but I don’t think that last part is yet clear.

(A)  I am about to be more specific.  For you (silently going along with certain erroneous identification you have made, such as Joseph Smallwood’s name):

Katrina, the Polish-Jewish girl.

John Cotton, of Virginia in the 1700s.

David Poynter, the Welsh journalist.

Joseph “Smallwood”, the transcendentalist.

I’ll stop there.  You could trace out your spiritual heritage just by examining the qualities of these “past lives” and seeing how they manifest in you.  And this is not to mention Bertram the monk or Joseph the Egyptian whose emotional link to the nonphysical shaped you so strongly.

Do you see the point of this?  You are shaped not of abstract “traits” but of lives that exhibited what we call traits.  How could you comprise these lives if the lives weren’t yet lived?

Yet – and this is an important clarification – it is as if future lives exist within you, as well, because – well, take your example.  Joseph Smallwood is one of your strands.  That means that he is connected directly to you, a “you” that is partly him and mostly other.  You comprise all of him – and many others.  He, and anyone in what we might call the objective past, equally comprises you as one strand, but in a different way.

(Q)  And I can see that this is a tangled mess, mostly due to linguistic difficulties and considerations of time.

(A)  Mostly due to the limitations of sequential presentation in words.  A picture would present it instantly – if such a picture could be drawn.