Enjoy!
Aside: A compass
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4010). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(Q) So - just a note on the process as I am
experiencing it - there is the pull of the continuity of your narrative (you
say, "next time we could begin here") and the pull of individual
responses in the form of email and blog comments ("Rita said x and such,
but it seems to me ...") and Charles' own requests for clarification from
me, and then as I say the posing of alternative questions we could ask.
None of this bothers me, and I'm
delighted that enough people are taking the material seriously enough to
wrestle with it and respond to it. But
I'm sure glad to have that naval soundings survey analogy to reassure me that
in a sense, we can't really get lost.
And I'm glad to have Charles' presence as a sheet anchor to windward. I can see that it would be easy to lose all
sense of direction, exploring these things.
In fact, I wonder if that isn't more or less what I have done all these
years.
(A) In wondering that, you are showing yourself
to be a child of the age you live in. So
do many of your questioners. I mean by
that, you are diregarding the continuing presence in your life of your
nonphysical self. This is a bit of a
diversion from the topic of suffering and good and evil, but it won't take
long, perhaps, and pursuing the thread because it presented itself is an
example of a way to live connected.
You have a compass.
What good is a compass to a
navigator who doesn't know it exists, or doesn't consult it? None.
But the compass is there, used or unused. Why should you or anybody fear getting
lost? And if you don't consult it -
tacitly or not, that is, doing it consciously or automatically, either one -
how can you expect to follow any course?
(Q) Between us, we're in a nautical mood today, I
see. I take it you mean what the church
would call conscience, only in a wider sense than knowledge of whether an
action or thought or projected action or thought is good and evil.
(A) The physical self forms what we loosely call
an ego, and that ego is conscious of what the senses report to it, plus what
its reactions to its environment report to it as emotions. As long as the ego's world remains bounded by
such limits, you have a very small boat in a very big sea, terrified of storms,
navigating at random, subject to course correction by emotional reaction to any
stray circumstance. But when that ego
realizes that it has a compass, everything changes, or can change, if the
compass is intelligently used. The ego's
higher self (call it) not only can read the compass, it can connect to GPS. It not only knows where the boat is, it knows
how it got there, and why, and where it set out for. And - stretching the analogy quite a bit, but
true to life - the higher self knows that it is the cause as well as the
experiencer of the circumstances the little boat finds itself in. Or, not quite. Let's say, it recognizes that no storm or
difficulty or anything that comes to be experienced is either random or purposeless.
But let's drop the analogy at that
point. You see that I mean to say that
if it were up to you (as it often seems to you) to shape your lives, you would
be vastly overmatched.
So, in this particular instance,
if it were up to Charles as his ego exists or you as your ego exists and
neither of you were in connection with your "higher selves", your
non-3D components that have never left you nor ever could leave you, then yes,
you'd be lost in moments. But it is the
very connection with the non-3D that renders this possible. Renders your lives possible.
(Q) And in the non-3D part of ourselves, we live
and move and have our being.
(A) Well, isn't that a perfectly valid way to
describe your situation?
(Q) It certainly seems so to me, and of course, I
find it satisfying to have a way of understanding the 2,000-year-old Christian tradition
without having to sign on to their contemporary understandings of it. I mean, all that knowledge and wisdom,
couched in language that we find meaningful - I always knew it meant something,
even if it didn't mean what it was explained to mean.
(A) And where do you think that knowing came
from, if not your non-3D extension, or source?
You tended to think of it as past-life knowledge, I think, but in that
case, why can't you read Egyptian?
(Q) I'd like to know that myself. But as you always say, let's consider that at
another time. The hour is half over and
we haven't gotten to the question yet.
(A) I think you will find that we have,
actually. It's all tied together. How can we discuss the question of good and
evil, and of suffering, and of the question of the meaning of life, if we allow
ourselves to disregard the fact that appearances are not accurate, that you are
not boats afloat in an unknown sea, adrift, with no origin, no purpose, no
projected port, no task, no larger purpose?
Suffering as by-product
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4055). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(Q) ... what is the purpose of suffering in the
world?
(A) Let me suggest a slightly different way of
looking at the subject that my help some people. To say, "What is the purpose of -"
is to isolate something that cannot be understood in isolation. If you were to try to say, "What is the
purpose of a knee in the world?" you couldn't begin to answer the question
even in the simplest of ways without referring to the thigh and the calf, and
even if you left it at that, it wouldn't make any sense, not really. It might, for instance, be looked at as a
weakness in the leg, because obviously such a complicated joint would look like
a makeshift, compared to the relative simplicity of the bones it connects. And, of course, if you want to explain about
the mobility it offers, you are going to wind up talking about hips and feet
and the body in general, and gravity, and musculature, and blood circulation,
and the ongoing repair of cells - and there's no end to the things a simple
discussion of knees would entail. And
every time you tried to put it into context, somebody would be saying, "But
I want to know why there have to be knees in the world, and you're telling me
all these irrelevant things!"
So, rather than asking, "What
is the purpose of suffering in the world?" I suggest it would be better to
ask, "What is it in the nature of the world that produces suffering as a
by-product?" That may sound like
the same statement, but it is not. It is
like explaining about exercise and how the deliberate exhaustion of the
muscle's cells produce pain but also produces new growth. If you were to decree that nothing should
ever produce pain, because you decided that pain is bad, then what have you
just done to life? How many doors have
you closed off? How many activities of
greater interest and with greater rewards have you just foreclosed?
(Q) I agree, of course, though I don't know how
it will look after I disengage and our joint mind is not shaping my perceptions!
- but I predict that some will look at this as merely an apology for evil.
(A) No doubt.
But you can learn from a lesson or you can reject it - you can't really
do both.
Pain as feedback
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4104). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) I suggested that suffering is better seen as
a by-product than as a desired result, and I could continue in different directions
by continuing to use physical pain as the metaphor. Thus, pain as a signal to the body that
something is wrong. Pain as a signaling
system, in other words. That is one very useful attribute of pain that is
easily overlooked. Pain as feedback
looks very different than pain as something introduced into the world for the
entertainment of the non-3D.
Unsuspected background influences
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4123). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(Q) I think today I'll leave it up to you where
we begin, and I'll try it in the journal, the old way. Something didn't work out yesterday, and I'm
wondering if it is too many variables.
(A) Or could it be that things beyond your
ability to observe them make some times propitious and others not, and some
times extremely auspicious and other times particularly unsuitable. It is a mistake to underrate the powerful
influence of the background influences in your lives. You aren't immune to them, and how should you
expect to be? You are a part of the
great beating heart of the world, or a part of the great clockwork, if that
more mechanical analogy appeals to you - part of a vast undivided eco-system
that extends throughout all of 3D (because, of course, there cannot be any
absolute divisions) and extends throughout all non-3D, as well, which is going to be a different thought to you,
and therefore an important one.
When in 3D - I remember it well -
there is a tendency to think that the nonphysical world is unchanging, somehow
static. But how could it be, given that the
3D world is part of it, and reflects it, and provides part of the
background for it, as the non-3D provides part of the background for 3D? It is all in one's viewpoint, one's place to
stand, which is the background and which the foreground?
The non-3D world has its tides and
its seasons, and they are reflected in the mental and psychic background of
life in 3D. And I'm going to leave this
for now - think of it as a teaser for coming attractions - and return more directly
to the question of good and evil, and of suffering, and of justice or injustice,
the compassion or indifference, of life and the factors that make life. I will talk and you will respond, internally
or externally, and I will continue to talk following any sense of the lack of
comprehension and the nature of the mental or emotional obstacles to
understanding as we go along.
The real nature of tragedy
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4146). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) Now, about good and evil. Remember that anyone reading these sessions
in a fixed form - a book, a printout, a collection of emails, anything - is
going to receive a lot of information in a time much more compressed than what
it took to express initially. So, things
that are already ancient history to you - said two weeks ago, and half
forgotten - will come [to the reader] within minutes of this session,
perhaps. So will anything remembered
through the process of random rereading, which, by the way, is a process I
recommend for making new connections.
So, concepts that took some time
to establish will be accepted easier not only because initial readers broke the
trail for them, but because the sheer weight of material will lend authority,
as for instance in the case of Seth's material.
One such concept is that the world
is just. Any given piece of it, seen in
isolation, will seem unjust or unnecessary or even downright arbitrary, but
this is because it is being seen divorced from context. The ugliest fact is nonetheless part of a seamless
whole and has its place. Wolves kill baby deer, if they get the chance
and are hungry. Cruel? Well, how about the world if any one species
has no natural predators to keep it in check?
A herd of deer half-starved because they have outstripped [the carrying
capacity of] the environment they live in is not a pretty sight either.
But this is not a lecture on
ecology beyond this one statement. Tragedy is not what it appears to be. And if you will walk with me a bit, I can prove
it to you.
Near-death experiencers have
reported what they went through on their way out of life, and you will notice
that in every case, as soon as they were free of the 3D-only perspective, they
not only were okay with it, usually they were glad of it, and often enough were
extremely reluctant to be returned to life.
So much for death as a tragedy in and of itself.
Similarly, such accounts - and
accounts by scientific naturalists - notice that the animating intelligence
often leaves the body before the actual trauma that ends the life.
When there is no need for pain,
why experience it? So much for horrible
traumatic deaths.
Furthermore, various reports -
from NDEers, psychics, etc. - show you that sometimes people see behind the
curtain and see the inter-weavings of various free wills that produce
apparently random events. It cannot be
proven to anyone determined not to be convinced, but then, what can? Nevertheless, it is a fact that nothing happens to people without their
consent. And, since that flies in
the face of so much experience, let's look at it.
(Q) I can hear the howls of outrage.
(A) Yes, outrage that I am about to say that all
is well. Why? Is there an emotional payoff to believing in
what you call the victims-and-villains scenario? Clearly there is, or there would be no
outrage at hearing good news. However,
that reaction is not to be confounded with incredulity, which is a very
reasonable reaction.
That is, it is one thing to think
"you're going to have to convince me, on this one!" and it is
something very different to think "life is unfair and only those of a
lower morality can doubt it; I am not going to be seduced". For those whose self-definition is closely
tied to a belief that they are more moral, more sensitive, than the creators
and maintainers of the world around them, I have nothing helpful to say other
than "know thyself". For those
willing to be convinced - no matter how high their standards of proof - the
following:
Is it fair that cells in a body
sacrifice themselves for the sake of the body as a whole? Is that even a fair description of the process,
given that the cell's life and death is as it was planned for cells in general?
Is it possible for a cell to have
a purpose separate from the body of which it is a part? I don't mean, can it have separate (or
relatively separate) awareness; I mean, can it not be part of what it is part
of?
Is it unfair that some cells
become part of a fingernail and share whatever happens to that fingernail while
others get to be part of "something more important" like heart
muscle? Is it unfair that various cells
are sloughed off or sacrificed while others are not?
Of course it is unfair, or at least discriminatory - if you look at it from the point of view
that pretends the cell is a valid frame of reference rather than a close-up of
one part of an interacting organism. But
if you look at the larger picture, the cell's importance and its proper place
in the scheme of things changes. Not
that it is insignificant, for it is not a question of number, but that it is by
nature a part of a whole and cannot be understood in isolation.
But 3D life tempts you - all but
coerces you - into seeing 3D lives in isolation, and of course life is going to
be seen as unfair, chaotic, undirected, painful, meaningless. Is that the fault of the structure of life,
or of a constricted point of view?
What is it for?
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4192). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) So, trauma, injustice, apparently pointless
suffering, and all the results of the seven deadly sins - are they only
illusion?
No, not illusion. To explain something is not the same thing as
explaining it away. But they are not
what they seem to be, any more than your lives in general are what they seem to
be when looked at from a too-constricted perspective.
Life can hurt. You know it; everybody
knows it. The question is, though, what
does it all mean: what is it all for? If
the millions who die in concentration camps are not victims, what are
they? If people suffering because of
other people's indifference or cruelty are not victims of injustice, what are
they? Do they "deserve" to
suffer? If children, or adults for that
matter, spend lifetimes in constricted circumstances because of physical
illness, or as a result of accidents or deliberate maimings, are they
victims? Do they deserve to suffer? Are they paying for past (or future) sins?
None of these questions can be
resolved meaningfully without considering the widest context of life. Any smaller context is going to look like
injustice. Context is everything in understanding life.
Context
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4215). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) The point should be evident. Nothing seen out of context is going to make
sense, and why should anyone expect it to?
Logically it amounts to a tautology: Things only make sense when seen in
a way that lets them make sense. If for
some reason you were to have a vested interest in "proving" that life
is unfair, you could do so easily, unanswerably, merely by narrowing your focus
and selecting your data. But
"proving" that is not
unfair, though it involves widening your focus and broadening your selection
criteria, is not as easy as that, which is why so many theological and
philosophical efforts to do so are so unsatisfactory and, often enough, forced
and unconvincing.
The fact is, the context that is
critical is not selection of data in time and space - historical examples - but
specifically the broadening of the process to move beyond time and space, to move deeper
than time and space, because it is specifically in assuming that life is
what it appears that the underlying errors of interpretation sneak in and lead
to outrage and despair.
In any case, the point is, the
"modern" way of seeing the world led to several dead-ends because
they seemed logically incontestable but morally repugnant and practically
without a way forward:
1. Life
begins at birth (or conception; choose one) and ends at death, and that's the
end of it.
2. There
is no "supernatural" world to relate to. No God, no angels, certainly no
humans-become-dwellers-in-heaven (i.e., saints). We are alone on Earth, and that's the end of that.
3. We
are alone in a pretty meaningless universe, and any attempt to see meaning -
any teleology - is self-deluding weak-mindedness.
4. Most
of our surroundings are dead. We living
(who, remember, are here by accident) are a few exceptions to an overwhelmingly
dead universe.
5. Because
of the foregoing predicaments, you must put your hope (if you insist on having
hope) in the future, in science, in social evolution, in what does not exist, because it does not exist.
6. By
reaction against this, some move to want to destroy the entire intellectual,
social, economic edifice that left them stranded, and so they become glorifiers
of anything primitive, even while continuing to remain dependent upon the same
infrastructure derived from the worldview they reject.
7. Similarly,
others (sometimes the same people at different times, confusingly enough to
themselves and to others) accept the description of the world but reject its
consequences. They accept the premise
but hope to reform the effects.
(Q) Wanting to build "a better world".
(A) No reason to mock the impulse. I felt it myself, especially before Bob Monroe
turned what I thought I knew upside down!
But it is true, you can't build a better world merely by wanting
to. you need to know the roots of what's
wrong with it.
Now look at those few
underpinnings of the dead-end view of the world. Remove them and what do you have?
Eternal life. Perpetual interaction with the other
dimensions, the rest of life. Inherent
meaning. A living universe. And there
is no need to invest your hope in social movements, or the inevitable
"progress" that time will no doubt provide, nor some sort of mental
split that will allow you to have your materialist cake and eat your
nonmaterialist values, too.
(Q) That metaphor kind of fell down, there.
(A) So it did, but the point should be
clear. By considering the universe - by re-considering it - you have already
half escaped the mental/spiritual trap set by your times. But of course it isn't possible to remain in
the doorway forever. Either you will
move out into freedom or the trap will close around you again. In short, you will let this and other
material change your life, or you won't.
You can't both change and non-change, not ultimately. You can waver for a while, but sooner or later
that will amount to deciding by default.
Choice and free will
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 4266). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(Q) I don't know if this is the time - I assume
it is, since it came to mind - but somebody asked how "all is well"
can square with free will. I didn't
understand the question, but I imagine you will.
[Judy McElroy's question: "If
all is well, and all is always well, does this not preclude free will? I easily see that each of us has predator
threads and prey threads; it would seem if all is well, it does not matter
which we focus on and exhibit. If I
can't screw things up, do I really have free will? As below ... one of my cells can screw up the
system by becoming cancerous. As above
...?"]
(A) The logical confusion lies in thinking that
free will is somehow dependent upon the result of the choice, rather than in the
nature of the choice as affirming a set of values in the person choosing.
It is true that each version of
reality stems from choices made. But -
Hmm, maybe a longer subject than
it appears at first, so let's go into it a bit.
Every possible choice exists, and
creates its own universe, so to speak. This is sort of true, though not in the
way physicists think, because they are conceiving of things as proceeding in
time as they imagine it, things coming into existence decision by decision.
It would be more accurate to say
that all these possible universes, the fruits of infinite numbers of choices by
infinite numbers of people, inhere in
the universe and, therefore, of course, always have. That's what inherent means. You make a choice, you don't create a world, you walk a certain world. You
choose and your choice provides you the next step on your path.
Doesn't that make more sense to
you just intuitively? Does it feel right that your every choice should
create a version of the answer? Or is it
not more intuitively right to say your every choice is a choice among worlds
already existing?
Not that I knew any of this in
life. I remember being pretty thoroughly
confused when the guys tried to explain it.
Well, if it is clear that life in
3D is merely a long (or short) walk in the hall of mirrors, or labyrinth or
however you wish to see it, then it should be clear that life in 3D is not about
creating a better world (or a worse
one, either); it is about creating you. It is about using 3D and 3D's conditions of existence
to carefully forge a mind - a soul - that will thereafter function in non-3D as
a unique mirror, or touchstone, among the others already existing.
So now come back to your
accustomed view of reality, whichever it is, and attempt to see the world through
both, alternately, or through both in stereo view, if you can do that. From the everyday view, pain and suffering,
good and evil, still exist. We haven't
defined them away. But the context for
life being different, how can the meaning and the very experience of good and
evil, and of suffering, not be seen differently?
So that is what I mean by context,
and that's enough for the moment. You
and Charles may consult and see where you wish to go next, or if you ask the
right open-ended question, I'll go off on my own hook.
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