Here are some extracts that I put together this morning.
Continuity and Individuality
From DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the
Non-Physical (Kindle Locations 570 - 682). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition:
(Q) If there is a continuing Ernest Hemingway
presence, say—or a Rita presence!—how
does this square? How can we be both separate and not separate?
(A) Let’s start with homely analogies. You live in a
place—the house you lived in when you rented from me, say. While you are there,
that is your life’s center. Your body lives there, and that is where you do
your work. You think, you read and write, you communicate, and all your
activities, mundane and mental both, take for granted your existence there, on
Roberts Mountain Road. You don’t think you are the house, or the
community where the house is, but you take for granted that this is your
context.
You move to another house, another community. Your memories
are the continuity with the consciousness on Roberts Mountain Road, but your
new surroundings are your new life’s center. You are the same person as before,
yet you are also not the same person. You today know things, have experienced
things, have perhaps suffered and enjoyed things, have forgotten things, that
the “you” living on Roberts Mountain Road had not. Yet obviously you are a continuity.
So if you look at things as flow, you have to say you
changed, time passed, that earlier version of you no longer exists, and no
one can say that this is an incorrect summary of the situation.
But if you look at things as a series of situations —
snapshots instead of movies, or perhaps better, stills from a movie — it’s
different. If every moment of time exists, and does not cease to exist, the
snapshots, or stills, are as accurate a description as the movie.
So — are you a continuity? Yes. Are you a definite defined
being? Also yes. The confusion about reincarnation and about life in general is
rooted in a misperception of time that is rooted in a misperception of reality
due, as I indicated earlier, to imperfect apprehension of higher dimensions of
reality, collapsing and confusing them into one’s perception of time. As one
clarifies one’s perceptions, the nature of things changes. In effect, one
lives in a different world.
(Q) All right, and this ties in to the nature of us as
communities.
(A) Yes, because it both is and isn’t a mistake to
think of continuity in terms of continuity of a given unit. The “you” who lived
in my house for those few years did not continue as a unit to move to a new
dwelling in another place. As I said, the “you” writing this is not precisely
the same “you” as the one of a few years ago. You couldn’t be the same and
still experience, for experience alters. And such sequential alteration is the
purpose of 3D life, after all. The physical end of things is the hothouse,
forcing plants.
But if we leave off thinking of the individual as a
unit and think instead of each person as being a community, it may be easier to
conceptualize how different members of that community may be more activated or
less activated by changes in circumstance. If you cease to live in the woods
and move to the city, the part of your community that loved to walk in the
woods may become quiescent, and the energy of the overall unit flows elsewhere,
to social interactions or libraries or whatever.
Two ways of seeing things, both true, neither the whole
story.
(Q) As I was writing that, the thought came to me,
each of the pieces of that individual’s community were themselves individuals
at some point.
(A) Again, both yes and no, but that will advance the
argument. Take an historical figure: Thoreau, say, or Abraham Lincoln, to take
two of your favorites.
(Q) Or Ernest Hemingway.
(A) Or Ernest Hemingway, but also anyone else who has
ever lived, known to history or not. That bundle becomes a strand available to
other communities downstream—but not upstream—in the formation of new
individuals. That is, after Lincoln lives, his life as a whole provides
material to be a strand in a person, as for instance he is in you. Before he
lived, he was not available except by reflection.
(Q) You’ll need to say more about that.
(A) Oh, I know it! But, you see, we’re getting
somewhere. As I told you a few years back, sometimes, in order to understand A
you have to understand B, but to understand B you have to understand A; and in
such cases, all you can do is keep inching closer by continually refining your
understanding of either, then reconsidering the other in the new light, and
continuing the process.
(Q) Stepwise refinement, in metaphysics.
(A) Did you think your time as a computer programmer
was wasted? You learned certain skills, learned certain concepts and ways of
thinking.
Time and change
(A) So next we need to look at the nature
of time. It is true that time exists. It does not flow; consciousness
flows, and in the body it is experienced as flowing one way and one way only.
There is a reason for that. It is experienced in a way that echoes the reality
of change.
Consider the pyramids, to use your old example. You cannot tear
them down before they were built. You cannot write on the walls of a building
before it is erected. You can’t marry a person before he or she is born. There
is a sequence to things, and it is not arbitrary. It has its inherent
logic.
Just because time is not what it appears does not mean it
can be anything and everything someone can imagine it to be. Every moment of
time exists, but it exists, as you exist, as the sum of what preceded it, and
as the seed of what will follow it. The fact that the movie may be viewed
out of order, and the stills considered separately and at random, does not mean
that the movie itself is out of order, separate or random.
So, to return to Lincoln, he is available as a package, as a
new unit, as a new strand, for individuals downstream from his life. But prior
to 1809, there was no Lincoln. (Thank you for the date, which I plucked from
your memories.) Prior to 1809, the strands that went into the making of Lincoln
existed, but the net result of his life—the container as it was frozen by the
end of new 3D experience by death—did not. After 1865, it did.
(Q) When you and I got this material a dozen years
ago, that part was never spelled out clearly. The guys—as I thought of them
(and still think of them, pending a new way of thinking about them)—talked
about patterns, and they said some patterns were worth keeping and others
weren’t; and at the time, that seemed to you like they were saying some were
worthy and some people weren’t.
(A) You [as conduit of the responses] weren’t able to
give us a very clear picture at that point, because the concept was too
unfamiliar, and your mind couldn’t help trying to make sense of what you were
getting in light of where you were, what you knew. What would have been clearer
would be to say that some people’s lives create a new pattern that can be used
as one strand in a new bundle, and many people’s are not sufficiently different
to serve in that way. That doesn’t mean the ones that are not different
enough to serve as patterns were failures, or were discarded. It means
from the point of view considering flow, they can be disregarded. Remember, at
the time, the guys were working on giving us a new way to see the world. Side
trails would have confused the issue, so they often ignored them. Besides,
side-trails lead in all directions, and anyway there’s not really a difference
between the main trail and a side trail. It all depends on where you feel like
going. If you want to go explore some bright object you see out of the corner
of your eye, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing so.
(Q) Thank you, Rita. This really does bring some clarity to
things.
(A) Whose mouth was it that told me, “the better the
question the better the answer?”
Continuity by intent
(Q) Okay, Rita, how do we get memories of past lives,
when we do? …
(A) A thread may be very thick, or I would say,
better, may be very solid, very much made more permanent by the living of that
life, and so it may be more prominent in its expression; it may also be clearer,
more accessible; and it may be a good transmission medium for the predominant
lives that shaped it.
(Q) I hear—like the successive Dalai Lamas.
(A) Yes, that is a good example, for several reasons.
It is transmission by intent. It is foreshadowing by clarity and intent.
It is continuity through intent and prior achievement. This is a potential for
anyone to begin, if one is wishing to do the work.
(Q) Perhaps it would be as well for you to unpack
those statements you made.
(A) It is transmission by intent. That is, the
continuation of the line of awareness and internal access is a priority during
life. A Dalai Lama works at self-development continually, and that work enables
the continuity in a way that would not follow if he spent time at racetracks,
or stock exchanges, or mundane family life. Nothing in life is achieved without
an exchange of effort and attention.
It is foreshadowing by clarity and intent. The dying Dalai
Lama hints to his followers where they will find his next incarnation.
This he can do because he can look among futures and choose, and because he
chooses by weighing what will be desirable.
It is continuity through intent and prior achievement. The
perpetuation of the Dalai Lama line through fourteen incarnations is a project,
an intergenerational agreement to provide a people with a living symbol. This
could not be done if the Dalai Lama spirit (call him) was unable to continue
unbroken intent. Even when young Dalai Lamas were killed by power-hungry and
treacherous assistants, the intent to preserve the embodiment of the same
consciousness was maintained. You will notice that the present incarnation has
his doubts as to whether the long experiment/demonstration/gift
should continue, because it is not intended to exalt the bearer of the
office, but to serve the people; and if that purpose seems permanently lost or
altered, there would perhaps be no need to continue.
The Dalai Lama serves as an example, because everyone knows
the name, but not because he is the only example of such enterprise; far from
it. He is perhaps the best known, the longest known, but other spirits are
doing the same thing, silently, unknown, and not to be known.
So there is your answer in brief. People sometimes remember
past lives if they have strands sufficiently active that they are manifest, and
if it is in their own interest that they be exposed to such evidence. Many
experience what you call the resonance, and never suspect it. Some
experience it and do suspect it, or define it in one way or another. And for
some, the clarity approaches normal consciousness.
Reality as net
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical
(Kindle Locations 705-764). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.
(Q) … are [there] vibrational levels where one
rests, reviews, heals, seeks knowledge and then the wisdom to share. These
are what she calls the first Five Planes after one dies. Then she describes
seven ‘higher’ planes where a ‘soul’
goes about ‘life’ after death. ...
(A) Bear in mind that the term “vibrational levels” is
a concept formed by taking a higher-dimensional reality and forcing it into
sequential 3D experience. It is unavoidable, but it is necessary that you
remember that it is analogy. Everything you can be told is a translation. Thus,
the spatial analogy sneaks in—as you and I were told in our sessions—and makes
it seem as though one would have to go through territory A, B, C, and D to get
to E. As you will remember, TMI participants tended to think in the same way
about Focus levels, as though Focus 21 could be reached only by traversing
levels 10, 12, and 15.
(Q) I well remember when I thought that way myself.
The numbers seemed to make it obvious. Only with experience did it become
clearer that it wasn’t sequential unless you conceptualized it that way.
(A) Bob [Monroe] did try to undercut that assumption
by introducing the one-breath technique, but perhaps he didn’t want to
rearrange people’s concepts too much, given that what he had given them was so
useful for practical exploration.
In any case, Charles quotes this woman as describing these
states of acceptance as if they were sequentially laid out, as if they
were stops on a railroad line. A better analogy would be short hops by
airplane, with the destination depending more on the intent of the pilot than
upon a necessary traversing of terrain. Not everybody touches on each of these
stops; not everybody touches on them in the same order.
A continuing source of confusion in these matters is the
question of who we’re talking about, for this is something as misperceived as
focus levels. Are we talking about the personality-essence that was formed in
that lifetime and has just emerged into what is its new life? Or are we talking
about the underlying continuity from which the personality was formed? And that
will take some examining.
(Q) I imagine so. And some definition (and yes, I
will bear in mind that all definitions are provisional).
(A) The safest way to go about this is to recapitulate
what you yourself were told long ago. It will be new to some, and it will
develop into new concepts.
Souls come into existence; or, they have existed since the
beginning of time. It depends on how you look at it.
Think about that for a moment; don’t just breeze past it.
New souls exist, or all souls are equally eternal on both ends (that is, they
have no beginning as well as no end). Both ways of seeing it more or less true,
neither way truer than the other. How can that be?
(Q) This seems to me to go well with
Peter Novak’s scheme in The Division of Consciousness: people are
conscious and unconscious minds, inhabiting the same body, either separating at
death or, more rarely, continuing, and this duality caused mankind’s two
opinions of the afterlife, reincarnation or judgment followed by heaven or
hell. What you see depends on what you focus on. [Rather than conscious and
unconscious minds, I should have said spirit and soul, but I won’t go into
that, as Peter’s book is not the focus but merely a by-product of the
theme.]
(A) The analogy with Peter Novak’s scheme holds
insofar as us discussing changing points of view. It does not hold otherwise,
given that his starting point is the individual and mine is the larger
community of which the individual is one part. This will become clearer as
we progress. The key to this work of perception and analysis is the willingness
to hold two contradictory views provisionally — not with the intent of
eventually deciding between them, but with the intent of seeing a higher level
at which they can be reconciled as partial views each with its own validity.
And of course, “higher level” — and any other way to say it that you could
think of — brings in the spatial analogy. It can’t be helped, only noticed,
just as the sequential nature of writing cannot be helped, only kept in mind as
an inherent distortion.
We keep coming back to this fact: If you examine a net, it
will appear to be one consistent unit when examined at one level, and a series
of knots, at another, and even may appear to be a confusion of knots and
spaces and strands, when seen at another level. And of course, if the net
is examined folded over itself, or full of fishes —
Existence is a net. I didn’t say physical existence, for as
I said, what you call and think of as the nonphysical is a part of the one
inseparable reality. That net is alive, and the strands and knots are not more
or less alive than the spaces, which, after all, are only nothingness when seen
from the view that sees strands and knots and cannot see what shares the
overall form.
(Q) Ether, holding together the heavens. A similar
example.
(A) Not so much holding together as comprising, but
yes, not a bad analogy. Materialist science looks between planets and
sees empty space, or did until recently. The medievals envisioned the
planets connected by a matrix they called aether, or the heavens. Invisible to
one way of looking, obvious to another. So, similarly, the question of what the
world is. Take the knots to be analogous to what you see as individuals.
Examine a knot and you see that it is not actually a thing in itself, but an
intersection of strands. Or, examine a strand and you will see it as nowhere an
independent element, but as inextricably bound to other strands by way of
knots, or it could not be part of a net. And, examine the net as a whole
(assuming we could envision the whole) and you will see that it is a holder of
pattern, that it holds strands and knots in a particular way so as to involve
what appears to be space; it binds the three elements that are in fact one
element—it all depends on what you examine, how you focus, and what your mental
concepts allow you to see.
But of course, like anything else I can say, it is only an
analogy. Its use is to remind you and others that concentrating on “the nature
of the afterlife”—or “the nature and meaning of life,” for that matter—produces
answers geared to the focus you bring to the question. If you remain fixated on
the individual—as if a net were only knots, and no strands and patterns and
spacing—you are going to get a different picture than if you examine the
individual knowing, holding in mind, that this is only one way of seeing a more
complex reality.
When you have a microscope and a slide being examined,
what you see will depend upon how you focus the lens. What disappears in a
given focus does not cease to exist; it only disappears from view. The trick is
to refocus, remembering.
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