Brain versus mind

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 2329). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  [Rita said she would start a session with this thought rather than trying to tackle it at the end of a session:

[“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.  If you consider the brain tissue that connects to the memory, realize that if it were quite that simple –“]

(A)  ... your memories would be quite as much at risk as if the memory itself was stored there.

(Q)  So we are like local CPU's, accessing the cloud?

(A)  Don't tie your understanding too closely to physical analogies - particularly not to technological analogies - or what will you do when the technology has become replaced by something else?  But in a broad sense, you have the idea of it.  Perhaps you could regard your brain as a temporary local copy of the mind you are constructing safely outside of 3D vicissitudes.

(Q)  I begin to see why you didn't want to start into this at the end of the session.

(A)  Yes.  Any statement needs to be described as to what it means and what it does not mean.  Many times the second part of the process is overlooked or omitted because the need is not seen or the implications are unimportant or mostly obvious.  But when one makes a certain kind of statement - something seemingly familiar but actually a novel spin on old concepts, or an unfamiliar usage of familiar words - it is well to try to reduce potential misunderstanding.

Thus, the paragraph preceding the previous one contains several ideas.

1. The brain a temporary local copy of your mind.

2. Your mind continually being created outside of 3D.

3. Implicitly, your mind already exists outside of 3D and therefore containing the results of your future choices, as well as your present and your former futures, if we may call them that.  And it is this last comment that will require the most thought, as it will be a readjustment for you, Frank, if not necessarily for anyone who may read this.

As to the first statement, which is only sort of true, the important part of it is the thought that your physical existence is not required for the preservation of the active, living, record of your life.  Now, language is a problem here, because as soon as you read "record" - even though the word has been preceded by "active, living", you tend to think of it as something fixed, and dead.  A record of something is itself not living and vital - or so language tempts you to think.  So find a better word than "record", so you don't have to make the continuing effort to remind yourself of the limits of the analogy.

(Q)  How about ghost, or spirit, or shadow?

(A)  That might work if you can remember from usage to usage (i.e., from moment to moment) that it is the physical that is the ghost of the reality, and the nonphysical that is the actual thing being considered.

(Q)  Speaking of making a Copernican Shift -

(A)  Yes, and you might as well begin making a habit of doing so.  When you place the sun in the center of your mental solar system, many relationships clarify.

The second point is also only approximately true.  From the 3D perspective, your mind is being created as you go along and is being created not in the physical, as it usually seems to you, but in the nonphysical where it really is because where you, or the larger part of you, really is.  Remember, we are not talking about physical and nonphysical being separate; we are talking - or trying to, against the silent bias of language - about the physical world being a local area of the whole - 3 dimensions among many.  (And yes, the whole idea of dimensions is itself an approximate term, used for shorthand convenience.)

Not just the record of your life; not just the mental part of your life, but the very physical existence you are aware of, all resides in the full set of dimensions because, as I said, everything has to exist in all dimensions if it exists in any.  So all this talk about physical or nonphysical is not meaningless, but it is not the absolute dichotomy it appears to be because of the language we employ.

And then we come to the third point ...

Uncountable versions

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 2385). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(A)  Here is the complexity that required a fresh mind.  [A mind fresh to the task]

(Q)  I know what you are intending to relate it to, and if you can clear up the tangle of half-understood concepts that we reported in The Sphere and the Hologram, but couldn't untangle, I'd be very glad.

(A)  Summarize the problem, if you would.

(Q)  Well, the guys told us that the results of every decision constitute an alternate version of reality, but that the idea of the world splitting with each decision was the result of thinking in terms of a past that ceases to exist, a present in which choices are made, and a future that is determined by the present, in contradiction to the view of time as existing - every conceivable variation of every conceivable scenario - from the time the world was created, here using "the world" to mean not Earth but the entire material universe.

It seemed to me this meant that some version of every one of us took every possible path - usually unknown to one another, but not invariably, I gather - which sort of defeats the point of "choosing, choosing, choosing" as the purpose of life, it seems to me.

(A)  Again, put the sun rather than the Earth in the center, and things clarify.  If you stop thinking of a physical life as "real" and start seeing it as a set of projections of nonphysical life, you aren't faced with the question of - oh, where do those uncounted number of alternate worlds exist?  Which version of your life - of your soul - is real?  How can all this make sense in terms of one individual (yes, relatively individual, but you understand what I'm getting at) being shaped and then functioning?

(Q)  I could never get a good handle on it.  I brought it through and had confidence that my translation wasn't very wrong, but I couldn't really make sense of it, though I tried.  I mean, I could sort of wrap my head around it, but I couldn't really connect it to the life I experience myself leading day by day.  And relating it is the point, isn't it?

(A)  It is.  Here is one clarification that may bring you far - again, provided that you make the Copernican Shift in your mind.

Start with the idea that the larger being selected this and that combination of elements to be you, inserting you in a certain place and time.  That is well and good as a working statement, but, in fact, describes the situation only approximately and from a 3D-based perspective.  Alter the perspective and you see that reality is actually a projection of inherent possibilities rather than a physical reality.  Therefore, it costs nothing to explore this or that set of possibilities.  One is as real as any other.

(Q)  I do get what you mean, but I don't think you've said it yet in any way that can not be wildly misrepresented.

(A)  Suppose a computer-generated image.  Suppose the image is systematically transformed so that every possible combination is displayed.  Suppose - harder, I realize - that all these possible variations are on display simultaneously and are simultaneously apprehensible.  The possibilities (whatever they may be) were all inherent in the computer program.  If they were not inherent, they could not have manifested, clearly.  There is no need to decide (or rather, arbitrarily choose to regard) which one is uniquely "real" and the others a copy or a theoretical manifestation, only.  Which one is "real" is simple - it is whichever one you are connecting to.

This, minus the sequential-time implications that insert themselves into the analogy, is more or less the situation.

(Q)  But understanding it depends entirely upon making the Copernican Shift.

(A)  If you try to understand it while trying to think of life as physical, sequential, and "real", you can get only a vague and theoretical understanding that will have no application to your life.

(Q)  So - I am sure someone will ask - if all possible worlds exist, meaning that all possible choices are made by some aspect of ourselves, what is the point of choosing, what is the point of working to create ourselves?

(A)  You are walking the possibilities.

(Q)  Oh, that explains it!  Huh?

(A)  We'll start there next time.