Cognitive impairment

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4387). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition

(Q)  ["Frank, here in my Continuing Care Community we have a couple of dozen folks with cognitive impairment.  The impairment is a continuum ranging from annoying loss of short-term memory to loss of the awareness of Self.  Some time ago, I got a flash that this has a role in the evolutionary process of our species - but that doesn't exactly compute in my 3D mind.  It does seem that this 'dementia' could be a variation on Rita's 'coma' experience - when she gradually allowed her consciousness to include her 'larger self'.  Could we ask Rita for some elaboration on this evolution of cognitive ability?"]

(A)  That was a flash of true insight.  The situation will become clearer to you [plural] if you will remember that it is not a matter of certain states being preferred from this side and others not.

(Q)  Just as we may not like sharks but that doesn't make them less necessary to an ecology, we may not like senility or coma or the results of brain damage, but that doesn't make any of them less useful to the non-3D, or rather to the sum total of things.

(A)  Yes, although "useful" slants it, a bit.  Say interesting, perhaps, instead.  If you were looking at a landscape, how could you appreciate it for what it is if you disliked trees?  Or onlyliked trees?  It is the value judgments you impose or allow that distort your "external reality" for you, thus ensuring that you never see anything as it really is, and that you never see anything in precisely the way it appears to others either.

If you start from the very natural idea that unimpaired functioning is "good" and any disruption of that functioning is "bad" - how can you see clearly what is really going on?  When I first tried pot - which certainly qualifies as a disruption of functioning! - I got a quick lesson in the difference between "normal" and our idea of normal.  Or - well, perhaps this is a side issue, but I mean, merely, so much of our experience of life cannot be well understood if we attempt to judge it prior to experiencing it.  But we have only a few minutes left in today's conversation, and I want to finish saying a couple of things that Dick's question suggests.

Dick, suppose those patients were having super-normal experiences.  In other words, suppose that - whether or not they could communicate them - they were experiencing something well beyond the normal range of human experience. (Understand, I am not saying that they are; I am saying, suppose they were.)  You can see that those 3D individuals having those extraordinary experiences would be of value to the non-3D community (call it) which, of course, would be able to share the experience via first the 3D person's non-3D components, and then as general shared knowledge.

Well, remove the filter that says this abnormal condition is valuable, but this one is an unfortunate predicament, and you can see that outside of 3D the value may be the same.

There are always more connections to be made, in many directions.  But this is enough for today.  Only, the thought Dick had is valuable.  Much that seems abnormal and even catastrophic around you - the explosion of autism, for instance - bears within it the seeds of things unsuspected but not therefore undesirable.