"Flickering" Earth

“The planet has seen many changes.  It has appeared and disappeared many times.  It flickers off and on – but because of the intervals of your attention, each “on” period seems to last for millions of years, of course, while at other levels the earth is like a firefly, flickering off and on.

“I do not mean by such a description to minimize the importance of physical life, for All That Is endows each portion of its own transformed reality with a unique existence that is duplicated nowhere else, and each spark of consciousness is endowed with a divine heritage that is never extinguished – a spark that is apparent in all other corners of the universe.”

(Dreams, “Evolution” and Value Fulfillment Vol 2, Session 918)

Rita on living in connection

Living in connection

From DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World Vol 2: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 4137). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition".

(Q) [Bob: "This session prompts a question.  Anyone who has read this material or other books by Frank knows about the strands of connection.  Some of these strands are 'past lives', as mentioned today.  But how does the 'normal' human, enmeshed in his or her illusion of individuality, and in the day-to-day living of their lives, connect with these other strands without spending, as Frank did, many years working on that connection?  What is the how-to here, what is Rita's advice on how the everyday reader of this book can make that connection in their spare time?  Just about everyone says 'meditate', yet there are people who meditate for decades without that connection (or at least it goes unsuspected by the conscious mind).  Does Rita have a different take on the method to connect?  I suppose that the subtle connection is already there, as in the earlier unsuspected influences of David, Joseph, etc., on the 'present-day' Frank (until he became aware of them).  Is there a way for the average Joe or Jane to become aware of those connections without spending years in a Tibetan monastery?  Sorry, too many questions.  Just use whatever works for the book or not."]

It sounds like many but really it is just one - how does one connect or make the existing connection effective?

(A) Let's answer the question as asked.  How does the average person connect with their comprising strands "in their spare time"?

The short answer is, they don't.  And they don't do it by spending years in a monastery, either, nor by meditating.

... here is my one-sentence attempt to help the spark jump the gap: What makes you (anyone) think an effort is required to connect with your comprising strands?

A second sentence: What makes you think any effort from the compound-being end of the continuum would suffice, or even assist?

A third: Have you ever heard of the concept of Divine Grace.

(Q) This is all clear enough to me.

(A) And to some others, but for you, and for others, now comes the filling-in stage, where the complications enter.  But it would help for you to state your understanding of the reality I just, somewhat cryptically, attempted to convey.

(Q) I don't think it is that hard.  And once again, I am reminded of the help we could get from theological investigations over the centuries.  A state of grace is one thing, and I'm not even very sure of what is meant.  But Divine Grace as an active element in life is unearned.  It comes to us; we don't take it or earn it.  And that's a very interesting key, here.  (I almost said "clue", and maybe I should have.)

Bob's question assumes there is something we can do, even need to do, from the 3D end of things.  If I get your meaning, you are saying it is not up to us, and we can't do it even if we want to.  The best we can do - and all we need to do - is to be receptive to it.

(A) What is your concept of resonance, if not an awareness of that fact? "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free."  That's what it means.  But by what effort can you (anyone) come to knowthe truth?  You don't so much find it or figure it out - though for some that process can enter into it - as recognizeit.  You may do so on hearing it, or by living it, or just out of the blue (as your inner connections make the jump, and the knowing transfers closer to your consciousness until it breaks through) - but what you can'tdo is dictate when or how you will get it.

(Q) This illuminates so much!  I wish I had the theological arguments in my mind.  I'm going to have to get all this to Jim Marion.  I think he'll see it.  [Jim Marion, a former Catholic priest, authored "Putting on the Mind of Christ", a psychological analysis of stages of mental and spiritual growth based on the work of Ken Wilbur.]

We can resist but we cannot force.  We can be open to receive, but we cannot accomplish by any given effort. That's a whole line of theology, even though the assumptions of reality that the theology were based on are quite different.

(A) That is why I began - the Guys began - by redefining who we are and what reality is.  The reason the theological arguments do not illuminate today is because there was no connecting-point between the inner world of the theologians and inner world of those living today.  But a moment's thought (how often do I wind up saying this!) should have made it clear that no extensive body of thought can be irrelevant to the whole.  To throw away theology may be necessary in order to reshape a society's mental world, thus shaking up what is or isn't possible, but that is not the same thing as saying that what was discarded was of no value. Think what Jung derived from his study of alchemy, or astrology.

(Q) This session - I think it is the 100th - is a natural wrap-up to the introduction to life, isn't it?

(A) It can be; that is always a choice, because reality has no seams or divisions except provisionally.  But yes, this final concept does round it out.  It isn't a matter of your having to work to get the concept; it will resonate or not, partly but only partly depending upon your being open to it. Being open to it would not be enough considered abstractly, but in practice only those who are ready will be open to it. To others it will seem nonsense or mere speculation.

(Q) One theological school said Divine Grace was sufficient.  Another insisted on the necessity of Good Works, if I remember rightly.  I don't remember the specifics - it was the basis for a lot of Protestant divisions in the 1600s and thereabouts, I think.  In fact, also earlier, and later.

(A) Do you begin to see why Hilaire Belloc defined Protestantism as heresy rather than as another religion?

(Q) Protestantism and Islam.  I have the book [The Great Heresies]; I haven't read it.  My guess would be simply that he saw Protestant sects as splitting off one by one on some logical division, rather than holding the tension of opposites within itself as the Catholic establishment did.  But it seems to me that any religion may be seen as doing that.

(A) Yes.  You could say that any given religion, though useful to some, is in effect a heresy from the great reality, to the extent that it considers itself an exclusive truth or bearer of truth rather than as one source of light among infinite sources. And of course, it is natural for each one, insofar as it expresses a clear understanding of one aspect of reality, to consider itself enlightened and enlightening, and others as wrong to whatever extent they contradict it.

(Q) True of the religion of Scientism, and of materialism, of course.

(A) No need to call the roll.  No one and no way of seeing is the exclusive way to the truth, and for that matter, not every understanding of the truth may be clearly expressed or even clearly understood.  The former statement is more obvious to people than is the latter.

So, the answer to Bob's very apposite question is - you've been given the word, yet again, new wine in new wineskins, and what you do with it is up to you.  What I advise you notto do with it is set up a new religion!  A much better use of your time would be to re-examine what you know, what you have lived, what you have at the periphery of your consciousness, and bring it forth to continue to transform your lives in reaction to - in interaction with - the revolution in your thinking sparked by this material.

(Q) Not quite Faith and Good Works.

(A) Not quite salvation or damnation, either.

(Q) True.  Well, I don't know what others will say to all this, Rita, but I for one find it has clarified my thinking.  Thank you for your end of the effort.  May I take it that there is more to come?

(A) There could be.  There is always more to be said and the additional material does not interfere with the first.

(Q) Thoreau, rough paraphrase.

(A) And he was right then and is right still.

(Q) So he is.  Thanks again, from everybody who has been affected or is yet to be affected.

(A) In short, as stated, the whole world.  (For who does your definition leave out?)

(Q) Bye for now.

Inner passageways throughout the universe

“Time’s framework does not exist as you think it does. Intervals of existence are obviously not the same.  In ways impossible to explain, there are what I can only call inner passageways throughout the universe.  You know how one association can suddenly in your minds connect you with a past event so clearly that it almost seems to occur in the present – and indeed, a strong-enough memory is like a ghost event.  So, there are processes that work like associations, that can provide passageways through the universe’s otherwise time-structured ways.  These passageways are simply a part of the greater nature of events that you do not perceive.

“At times your species has traveled those passageways, and many of your myths represent ghost memories of those events. There is a rhythm, again, to all existence, and so in your terms your species returned to its home planet, to renew its roots, refresh its natural stock, to return to nature, to find solace again amid the sweet ancient heritage of dusk and dawn.”

(Dreams, “Evolution” and Value Fulfillment Vol 2, Session 918)

Our universe in a musical metaphor

The poetry of this is really inspiring!

“There are phases of relatedness, rhythms and harmonies of consciousness from whose infinite swells the molecular “music” of your universe is sounded.  Your place in those rhythms is highly vital.  You exist in a kind of original interval – though, if you can, think of the word “interval” without the connotations of continuing time.  It is as if an infinite number of orchestras were playing simultaneously, and each note sounded was also played in all of its probable positions with each other note possible, and in combination with all of the probable versions of the entire piece being played.

“Between the notes sounded there would be intervals, and those unsounded intervals would also be part of a massive unstated rhythm upon which the development of the entire sounded production was dependent. The unsounded intervals would also be events, of course, cues for action, triggers for response.

“Your stated universe emerged out of that kind of interval, emerging from a master event whose true nature remains uncaptured by your definitions. … let your imaginations play upon the usual events of your world, and glimpse at least in part that greater brilliance that illuminates them, so that it leads you intuitively to a feeling for the source of events and the source of your world. The units of consciousness that I have mentioned are that, and they do behave as I have said.  They are also in other terms entities, fragments of All That Is, if you prefer – divine fragments of power and majesty, containing all of the powers of consciousness as you think of it, concentrations without substance in your terms.

“There are many other universes besides your own, each following its own intervals, its own harmony.  Your ideas of historic time impede my explanations.  In those terms, your world’s reality stretches back far further than you imagine, and in those terms – you need the qualifications – your ancestors have visited other stars, as your planet has been visited by others.  Some such encounters intersected in space and time, but some did not.  There are endless versions of life.  There are, then, other species like your own, and in the vast spectrums of existence that your reality cannot contain, there have been galactic civilizations that came together when the conditions were right.”

(Dreams, “Evolution” and Value Fulfillment Vol 2, Session 918)

Rita on "Which 'you'?"

Which "you"?

From DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World Vol 2: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 4039). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition".

(Q) Miss Rita, when we finished yesterday I had something on my mind as a continuation, but I have now forgotten what it is.  No doubt you know.  Over to you.

(A) You were somewhat vaguely thinking about how much you - anyone - can change or not change in your life.  Sometimes it seems the sky's the limit, sometimes it seems quite circumscribed, depending on the filter you view life through.

(Q) That's an interesting way to put it.  I would have thought to finish that sentence "depending upon circumstances", probably.

(A) Yes.  And thinking that change depends upon circumstances - externals - tends to put one into victim mode.  Thinking it depends upon conceptualization puts one back in the driver's seat.

(Q) I can see that.  But of course, if that were all that was involved - merely choosing - we would all be living trouble-free productive lives, or anyway whatever we wanted to be living.

(A) And that is an excellent jumping-off place for a discussion of good and evil, chance, fate, predestination and free will, and the connection between the individual as [commonly] experienced and the individual as community - the very extended community - it really is.  Not to mention the social external as experienced.

(Q) I hope you can explain it in just a few words.  I have these books I'm reading, plus there are those crossword puzzles to do, and Facebook to monitor.

(A) As you would say, very funny.  But all those subjects connect in one very elementary way, and exploring it will lead us far, in relatively few words.

Here is the key, given already but in another context.  You, although you experience yourself as an individual, comprise a community of strands, and so on.  A moment's thought will remind you that this is why we are all one - we interconnect, and not just as any one point but repeatedly and unpredictably.

(Q) Like Virginia genealogy.

(A) Yes.  Explain.

(Q) The early Virginia families intermarried continuously, so that eventually someone like Thomas Jefferson, say, with his Randolph connections through his mother, would have relations all over the colony.  Those relations might be related to him in more than one way - a cousin through one branch who was also a second-cousin or something through another line of that person's descent.  It got tangled.

(A) As does any closed society - and humanity is a closed society.  For that matter, all 3D is a closed society. All realityis a closed society - it's just a matter of how closely you examine relations.

Well, Virginia genealogy traces pastconnections.  But what if we look at present connections?  We - for more than merely 3D is involved here - are all connected, inextricably.

But so far this is too abstract to move anyone, and all I can do to make it substantive is to appeal to your imagination.  Let's use your supposed spiritual genealogy, Frank.  I say "supposed" because not everything you know or deduced is right, least of all names or details.  But let's trace it out as a way of giving people the idea.

So, there's Frank, living in the US in the 20th and 21st centuries.  He is shaped by what happens to him as well as by his physical heredity and geographical location.  In his case particularly, he is shaped by the construction he builds from books and other imaginative inputs.  All well and good, but there is a more primary set of inputs, long unsuspected [by him] but not the less experienced.

David Poynter, for instance, the Welsh boy who left his home among endless sheepherding to find a life in the city; who travelled extensively (for his time) and who devoted quite a bit of his life to journalism and to psychic exploration.  His influence on Frank was early - in an Anglophilia probably quite a bit stronger than David's own, but a result of an instant feeling of belonging; in an immediate resonance to the idea ofEdgar Cayce as soon as he read of him; in an immediate sure-footed life with his pen, and an instinctive knack for journalism that led to his first piece for his student newspaper in college being run unchanged.  In what could be called innate memories, such as the flood of grief Frank felt, in seeing only the words July 1, 1916 on a monument on the London Embankment.  And so forth. A strong influence.

And yet at an even earlier age, John Cotten, the young man of the American frontier of the late 1700s, a strong sense of the beauty of the wild world, and a resentment of reminders that it was no longer wild and untouched.  A feeling of displacement at being in a world without horizons, which his South Jersey home surrounded by trees and flatlands was.  If David called him to England, John called him to the woods that he loved to wander, led him to fantasize being a lone cowboy (though this not direct from John but, say, John interpreted by television), led him to emphatically see himself as American, with that pride in nationhood characteristic of the revolutionary era.  Contradictions, you see, but both valid.

Then take the much sought-after Joseph Smallwood, who reinforced the love of the wilderness (a love not made actual, notice, but no less strong for that) and who primarily brought the fascination with the West and with the Civil War and with Lincoln.  Later in Frank's life - another dozen years, when he was 24 - it led to Thoreau.  All these obsessions expressed in attitudes toward the world and in the experiences of the world.  And they all flowed with and against those of John and David.

And that only scratches the surface, of course, but it is one way for people to explore their own community - examine your lives for such influences and preferences, examine your "past-life" stories for resonances, see how things flow together.  Consider it all just a story you are telling yourselves, if that makes it easier; that isn't so far wrong anyway.  It isjust a story; it isthe real thing.

So, now, there is Frank, the product of a post-war upbringing in a family very different from John's and David's or Joseph's (of which, notice for what it's worth, he has explored, and found, almost nothing), being viscerally affected at intellectual and emotional levels by connections at first unsuspected by him but all the stronger for that.  None of the three we have mentioned is any more unitary than Frank is. They are all composed of many strands, each of which, etc.

When we say "you" - what are we referring to?

If the individual temporarily in the body - can it exclude the individual's strands?

But if all the strands, or even if only the most dominant strands, is there any unity?

There is.  And, there is only the everything.  And, all points between.

(Q) It depends on the viewpoint the observer chooses.

(A) Of course.  Now, let's postulate that you - anyone - can choose any version of reality you wish, at any time, and can choose again - what you call jumping timelines - any time you wish.

(Q) I get it.  Which you? or maybe I should say, how often do we vote?

(A) That's right.  And some people are very consistent - said to be strong-willed - and experience no internal conflict and so go straight to what they want, regardless of obstacles. That doesn't mean their way is magically smoothed for them, but they are in the right place at the right time, repeatedly, and they are at the still center.

(Q) Churchill, famously.

(A) Yes, although he wasn't particularly simple - many sides to him - he wasparticularly consistent, untroubled by contradiction (except, there was the Black Dog - depression - that we might say was the result of his suppressing so much, but that is a side trail).

Other people are blown by the wind, changeable as quicksilver.  You, for instance.  Your community shares access and alternates the hand at the wheel.

(Q) My natal Mercury is the one planet with no bad aspects.

(A) Well, your mercurial nature has nonetheless landed you in the soup more than once, but yes, mercury - quicksilver - is a good description of someone responsive to many influences.  For such a person, the more self-knowledge the better, yet it can be particularly difficult to acquire, for lack of a stable point from which to orient.

Your hour is up, however.

(Q) Can we not continue a bit?  I don't think you have quite cinched the nail.

(A) It is there for those who reflect upon it.  What you got is what you want - which "you"?  That's enough for today.

Reason and imagination

Lazaris lumps Intuition and Imagination together as one of our two "Bridging Senses" ... the two "senses" we use to connect the Inner Reality and the Outer Reality.  The other "Bridging Sense" is Balance.

Our ideal for human existence in 3D is to be fully aware of all of our senses (the 5 3D physical senses, and their 5 non-3D counterparts) and thus to be a fully functioning extension of our Soul Self into physical reality.

Unfortunately, our love affair with technology and "augmented reality" are seducing us away from that dream and leading us down a path of dysfunction, at least until enough of us wake up and get on the Gaia Ascension "train"!

“You can use your imaginations and intellects in other fashions than you do.  In fact, such fashions are not only genetically possible, but genetically probable. The imagination, of course, deals with the implied universe, those vast areas of reality that are not physically manifest, while reason usually deals with the evidence of the world that is before it.  That statement is generally true, but specifically, of course, any act of the imagination involves reasoning, and any [act] of reason involves imagination.”

(Dreams, “Evolution” and Value Fulfillment Vol 2, Session 917)

The following Rita discussion on "The Change" is very interesting and leads ultimately to insights on manifestation or YCYOR (You Create Your Own Reality).  The last paragraph is particularly important and reminds me of the following Edgar Cayce quote:

"Meet the problems first, though, in the spiritual; then the mental and the material results will become more satisfactory." - Edgar Cayce reading 459-12

"The Change" as flow

From DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World Vol 2: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 4004). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition".

(A) Now, consider.  Does everyone on Earth change houses on the same day?  Would it be a good thing if they did, or could?  Is everyone at the same stage of contentment or discontentment about their current home?  There is no more reason to expect everyone to be in sync about The Change than there is to expect them to play Musical Chairs about their houses all on the same day.

(Q) Obvious, when you put it that way.

(A) Is there some big external event that causes everyone to move?  Or is there a continuing slow-motion tsunami that sweeps them along?  Or a sort of ebb and flow that carries them generally?  Or a basic stability that is occasionally interrupted?  The short answer is, yes and no, and you ain't seen the half of it.

Reality is experienced one person at a time, and the reality I experienced in World War II was very different from [her second husband] Martin's, or a soldier's, or a factory worker's, or a teacher's, or a grandmother's, or a schoolchild's.  There were common orienting themes but they all played out according to individual natures, then, and always.

(Q) In other words, in a sense what we experience as "external" reality is a fiction.

(A) Well, that needs to be looked at.  You can't talk World War II away.  It happened.  It affected everyone on Earth, more as time went on, so that, for instance, given that 1980 would have been unrecognizably different if the war hadn't happened, you can see that major events utterly transfrom the field of possibilities. But that doesn't mean that any two people experienced the war - or anything - the same way.  Similarly in so far as they themselves were similar; totally differently in so far as they differed from each other.

(Q) I once met a man who said he carried a volume of Thoreau all through the campaign in Europe in 1944-45.

(A) And you talked to many men, and all their wars were different, of course, as was your friend's experience of growing up in a world in which there were no men of a certain age range because they were off to war.

(Q) I remember the man in Scotland, too, who grew up in Glasgow and saw it filled with Americans racing around in jeeps and trucks and all, and then one day they went away and never came back - and nobody thought to explain to a four- or five-year-old boy about D-Day and all.

(A) You yourself could remember probably a hundred people's second-hand glimpses of the war.  It should be enough to show you the interaction between individuals and social reality.

So, yes, there is a big The Change going on, and yes, it is experienced one individual at a time, but yes, given that "individuals" are themselves communities interacting along threads, you go right back to "we're all in this together", but yes, each individual community is at a different stage of development, so experiences something a little different.

(Q) Huh!  I don't know if it is in the actual words, but I certainly have the sense, from this, that it really does depend on your point of view how it looks.  In a way, you could say it depends on how we choose to look at it.

(A) Of course.  That's what "create your own reality" is!

(Q) I beg your pardon?

(A) Your life is what you make it.  You can't wish away what you don't like, but you canchange things, at many levels.  The more levels you are able to change, the greater your command of your life.  The ironic thing, as I realize now, is that you can all change everything or anything, and it is merely a matter of coming to the point of realizing it.  However, that a pretty big "merely".