1. I've read several books by authors who've accumulated information systematically about past lives and between lives, from patients, et al. For example, Robert Schwartz [Courageous Souls] and Michael Newton [Journey of Souls, Destiny of Souls] refer to souls existing in groups in NPMR and individuals there agreeing to act out certain roles in PMR with others. In some cases, souls agree to play negative roles against another soul for specific lessons. Another example is a soul learning by living the PMR existence of an alchoholic. These roles agreed upon before PMR would seem to indicate that all actions taken in PMR are not related directly to an individual's karma, so to speak. How does this fit in with your NPMR and PMR schema?

2. Both William Buhlman and Robert Monroe discuss NPMR locations which vary according the belief system, or consensus reality, of those residing therein. These exist for souls residing in NPMR between lives. Buhlman literally says that where we go when we die depends entirely upon what we believe is the *other* reality (NPMR). Monroe Instit. (heard via 3rd party) teaches a method for going to a location that is more free than any other--IOW, free of restrictive beliefs. However, if we refer back to Schwartz & Newton (1), one might conclude that there is one location and one paradigm.

2a. Why all of the apparent confusion about NPMR?

2b. What have you observed regarding life between lives and NPMR locations?

2c. If there are all of these variations, do we actually have a choice after PMR, or are we automatically located?

Roland: 1) These roles agreed upon before PMR would seem to indicate that all actions taken in PMR are not related directly to an individual's karma, so to speak. How does this fit in with your NPMR and PMR schema?

Tom: Entities can make plans to optimize an upcoming experience packet. They do sometimes configure (preplan) the basic challenges (learning opportunities) they feel offer the best opportunity for personal growth. Moderately evolved (lower entropy) entities can get more out of, and thus do more planning; less evolved entities tend to do less planning. A plan can set the stage and cast some characters, but freewill is in the driver’s seat and as we know, the best laid plans of mice and men "gang aft agley". Perhaps you should generalize your expression of karma to: many actions are directly or indirectly related to an individual's karma. Where “karma“ represents a sorted compendium of what an individual’s experience has indicated he needs to learn.

Roland 2a: Why all of the apparent confusion about NPMR?

Tom: Just being aware in NPMR does not make you any smarter or any more grown up. You are still you with all your personal limitations. You can grow up in NMPR as well as PMR, but it requires effort to accomplish growth in either frame.
Interaction in NPMR, with its lesser constraints, is much less objective and much more subjective — it’s not just another PMR. The objective sense of a PMR is created by its buttoned down rule set.
In third person books like “Journey of Souls, Destiny of Souls“, be aware that the souls being “interviewed“ have very limited understanding of what is going on or why it is going on and they tend to jump to conclusions and generate beliefs as readily in NPMR as they do in PMR. Also they are told only as much as is necessary to process them to the next step and only in terms that the individual asker can readily understand and appreciate — a typical exchange has the characteristics of how you would talk to a three or four year old about being forced to move to another city because of the crime rate in your neighborhood or because of a forced change in job location.
In many first person books, a typical exchange has the characteristics of how you would talk to a twelve year old. In some, like Monroe’s, the conversation is adult but still restricted or colored by the breadth and depth of the “interviewer’s“ and “interviewee’s“ conceptual understanding of the bigger picture.
Most of what you have read contains a thread of truth in it — it’s just not the whole truth and represents a limited, to a very limited, perspective. It does not express the way it is, but rather the way it seems from a personal (thus limited) viewpoint.

Roland 2b: What have you observed regarding life between lives and NPMR locations?

Tom: You are asking me to write another book here.
Combine the experiences of a bunch of pre-schoolers: 1) responding to a fire drill and 2) experiencing Disneyland into a single experiential event. Now imagine the adults/employees whose responsibility it is to matriculate the children through the process. That will give you the setting for the vast majority. Now imagine the same thing for a group of 12 year olds — that That will give you the setting for the top 1 percent. Now imagine the same thing for a group of 16 year olds — that That will give you the setting for the top .01 percent. Now imagine the same thing for a group of unsophisticated not particularly knowledgeable 25 year olds — that That will give you the setting for the top .001 percent.
Reality outside of the PMRs is, for the most part, subjective. We tend, out of habit, to make an objective place out of it. Forcing NPMR experience into the perceptual form factor of PMR, is the origin of most of the NPMR and afterlife descriptions you have read — they are not correct but do enable the experiencer to communicate his experience with other PMR residents who need the information put into a PMR spatial and objective context in order to comprehend it.
What have I observed? I have observed all four groups described above and have worked as part of the in-processing staff and as a special transition problems counselor for the first two — those need lots of staff. Like anywhere else, if you hang around and have useful abilities, someone will put you to work — (Everyone who can contribute is encouraged to contribute in a way that is helpful to both the individual and the system) also it is the best way to learn the way things work (from the inside).

Roland 2c: If there are all of these variations, do we actually have a choice after PMR, or are we automatically located?

Tom: You have all the choices that you are prepared and capable to make. Where you are not competent enough to make choices, choices are made for you in your best interest (as you would for the preschoolers.). It would be more accurate to say that you are led through a process and set of experiences that best suit your needs to grow and evolve your consciousness. You are not “located“ at all if such PMR conceptual structures such as distinct differentiated “locations“ are not necessary. There is no set place and process waiting for you or required of you — rather, you will find exactly what you individually need to continue your journey most effectively. The more you crawl out from under the fat part of the curve, the more individual will be your experience.

Tom C

Roland, I appreciate your asking these questions. While getting information from Tom that clarifies some things to me, more qustions are opened up.

Tom,

This thread opens up more questions for me. Based on the relative time/delta t increments and other aspects of the situation and descriptions by you and others, I had understood that NPMR was a VR in which our conscious existence was continuous. Periodically as either we or our "faculty committee" deem it advisable for us, we are involved in PMR sessions. During these sessions, I had understood that our NPMR consciousness continued with its normal activities, perhaps with a slightly reduced activity level. Stated another way, that for perhaps every 1,000,000 NPMR time increments, we might experience a single PMR time increment. So we are not particularly burdened in NPMR by the relatively small time increments stolen for our PMR experience packet. The PMR subset of our mind does not experience its time as discontinuous, but continuous with a slower rate not noticeable to our PMR consciousness. This means that our NPMR experience is continuous and I don't understand why there is any decision to be made on our "return" from PMR. Any question of relocation or of changed activities. We simply reintegrate back into our pre existing NPMR consciousness. Or is it that for those who need it, such as the areas and their occupants described by Robert Monroe as being locked into a version of their previous PMR lives, their PMR consciousness can continue separately in a consciousness session that transitions them from being locked into a PMR based mindset until realigned with their former, and still ongoing, NPMR activites?

Ted Vollers

Thanks Ted. But, generally, I ask less than 1/10th of what I'd like. Sitting and chatting would be better. Drilling down through layers of semantics by phrase hacking is like doing surgery with chopsticks, when it's two-way.

BTW, good question. May I ask, from where do you derive your information for this idea? What sources, I mean? I never read it put quite this way.

I've wondered about this myself. I think it may be that our consciousness subset remains discrete until it evolves to a point re-integration is meaningful. Perhaps the full potential of PMR experience is not just experience derived here, but the totality of evolution required before the gift of unique growth patterns can be taken home. That would include our evolution in NPMR as a big part of the picture because of the time frequency factor. If we think of the children metaphor, we interact with the adults on our own level until we grow into rejoining our oversoul as full participants in adult activity.

Roland you are so correct, the rigid structure of the written word is definitely limiting. Even with careful thought and crafting, ideas are are hard to exchange.

_________________
always, John

Ted, Roland, & Stroker,

Ted: "During these sessions, I had understood that our NPMR consciousness continued with its normal activities, perhaps with a slightly reduced activity level. ...... This means that our NPMR experience is continuous and I don't understand why there is any decision to be made on our "return" from PMR. Any question of relocation or of changed activities. We simply reintegrate back into our pre existing NPMR consciousness."

Tom: Your concepts are fundamentally correct. The VR NPMR consciousness continues with its normal activities, but those normal activities are primarily acting as guides for self and others as ability dictates, helping with the process of transitioning and reorienting individuals going both ways, and constantly processing all experience from all realities for lessons learned -- there is little socializing because it does not produces much valuable direct experience. Everybody, who is able to do so reliably, contributes to the success of the whole according to their abilities. Think of an ant in an ant colony or a bee in the hive -- that should be refreshingly deflating.

It is not that you are an ignorant child while your over-soul is a brilliant enlightened entity. Your over-soul has a larger perspective than you do because it is not focused (trapped) in the PMR rule-set. But it does not necessarily have lower average entropy than you do (unless your consciousness quality has been degenerating while in PMR).

One does need a little reorienting to integrate ones perspective and focus from PMR to NPMR (with less reorienting required the more evolved the being). There is no traveling to reunite with your over-soul or separate places for different kinds of beings -- that's a PMR space-time concept that has no application in NPMR -- however such descriptions provide a vaguely understandable metaphor for those undergoing more lengthy transitions. As Ted says, one just re-integrates one's awareness or focus to the whole of you. It can be a little like coming home after being a mistreated prisoner of war for ten years -- you recognize home and remember it well but everything (your reality) is different now and you have to reintegrate slowly even though you have lived there all your life. At the lower level it is more like coming to a large dysfunctional halfway house where many families live before quickly signing up for another tour of duty. At the upper level it is like returning to your comfortable relaxing home early Friday afternoon after a hard week and looking forward to the weekend -- but knowing that you need to start preparing for the big deal coming up next month.

Upon regaining awareness in NPMR, one switches ones focus and perspective to NPMR time and it appears that time moves along normally even though it is processing much faster. You can teleport about and gather data almost instantaneously but your sense of time passing during interactions (communication with others) is about the same. When everything moves faster together, the relative sense of interactive processing has the appearance of being the same.

The first thing one (the newly oriented and integrated over-soul) does (a reasonably well developed one, anyway) is to review all the experience data generated from the just ended PMR experience packet in the context of all past experience packets to glean additional lessons learned, assess lessons failed, and roughly outline strategies to develop situations within the next packet to learn what is needed most. Lower entropy "outsiders" (i.e., guides) may be helping with this exercise by offering guidance and suggestions. Eventually plans are made and perhaps coordinated with others to provide a less random, more optimal, experience opportunity for the next packet.

I am not quite sure what the issues are for each of you, but I hope this is useful in some way.

Tom C

Roland,

I will have to search to find all of the sources for my comments to answer your question a few panels up. However, in the time I was writing a much longer reply, Tom has created and posted his reply and your question may not be pertinent now after his further comments. Tom's reply incorporates my understanding of the situation and adds further clarifications that I had never seen before nor looked into. If you want further information regarding my comments, please re state your question taking Tom's comments into account so I can get my act together appropriately.

Ted Vollers

Tom,
I loved that reply. It was great to read and packed with interesting insights. Part of it has left me with a question. When the individuated unit that was your recent lifetime returns to the whole does it persist as an individual? Will my experience be as one of many personalities in a collective or is it fully absorbed and the only operational identity that of the higher self?
In Ultimate Journey Robert Monroe touched on this but he made it out like the individual personalities from past lives were active within his total self. It gave the sense of a community where he could converse with different aspects of his higher self individually.

Tom: "At the lower level it is more like coming to a large dysfunctional halfway house where many families live before quickly signing up for another tour of duty. At the upper level it is like returning to your comfortable relaxing home early Friday afternoon after a hard week and looking forward to the weekend -- but knowing that you need to start preparing for the big deal coming up next month."

This is the part that is throwing me. Is it a matter of development? I just was looking for some clarification. Sorry if I am reading something into this that isn't there.

Ramon

Ramon,

Yes, all of the above. Mostly when someone reports interacting with past lives or other personalities attached to his over-soul, he is interacting with the actualized or unactualized historical database - it's very hard to tell the difference (the difference being the possession of a free will).

Mostly, individual personalities persist and are maintained -- particularly if they are effective learners. There is some advantage in building on what is already established and in maintaining a continuity of accumulating experience. However, sometimes if a particular individual personality is unproductive it will be retired (absorbed) and perhaps replaced with something more effective. However, that individual (as an very accurate statistical model -- i.e., an assemblage of all the information that defined that individual personality along with probability information) will still be present in the historical database and is fully accessible there - it's just that new data will not be generated or updated to that personality file. That "retired" individual personality could always be given a free will again and reconstituted as an active unit -- they are fully defined in the database. Bottom line: If you want maintain the privilege of exercising free will, it would be a good idea to exercise it effectively. Evolution can be a pretty ruthless (efficient) process.

When I talk about higher or lower levels of individual development or evolution, I am referring to those individuated units of consciousness that happen to have higher or lower average entropy. There is no intrinsic class system or hierarchical organization - no vertical comparative assessment of value or potential value -- only individuals with higher or lower average entropy -- each working on their own thing the best they can. It is a very egalitarian system.

Tom C

Tom,
This is a topic that really interests me. I would say that one of my major areas of interest is understanding the concept of the higher or total self. I have reduced my ego enough to accept that "Ramon" is just a tool of my total self to gather experience and I had no problem with the idea that when this life is over the accumulated experience and knowledge of this life would simply be absorbed into the total and no longer be a separate entity but with the pattern stored in memory. But now it sounds like the personality might persist as a separate focus of consciousness within the larger FWAU that is our total self. I want to understand this better. To go back to a computer analogy, is there one processor running or is our total self more like many processors running in parallel? Is my present need for individuation making this issue more complicated than it is?
I need more experience with this I guess. Right now it is a little fuzzy.
Thanks,
Ramon

Raymon,

To use the computer analogy you initiated: I would say that there is "one processor running (or is) our total self" -- and that it has multiple applications running that accumulate progress toward their individual and collective goals within what appears to be (practically speaking) a never ending process (like an apparently infinite adaptive self modifying DO Loop)

Tom

I just received a letter from Ted and I thought the rest of you might like to share it and my answer.

Ted:
Thanks so very much for those recent posts under spiritual and personal growth. I don't think that it will act as entertainment for anyone, but will provide a great deal of clarification to anyone who reads it and has begun to understand things. I think that it will finally explain the real relationship between PMR and NPMR to many who are active on the forums. How things really work and what we do with our time in NPMR will satisfy a lot of blanks and questions. This is much the picture I have been developing in my mind about how it must be, but not being able to experience it as you do, I had no idea that there would be no socializing. It sounds like everyone in NPMR, once they get out of elementary school, needs to get a life. From your hesitancy to introduce 'entertainment', I made the assumption that there was in fact some entertainment value in a fuller picture. Now it looks like Jack is a pretty dull boy; a social worker in the cosmic soup kitchen, with no home life at all. Knowing enough to be able to picture yourself in the model helps a lot I think.

Tom:
Ted, I got a good chuckle out of that description.

The entertainment value is not in the normal everyday workings of the hive but in the big world that contains the hive. This larger world, some of which comingles with OS, contains a myriad of life-forms that are just "hanging out" for the most part (like a bunch of teenagers at the mall), and others just passing through taking care of business and running errands (like the mall shoppers). Just like here, those more or less permanently "hanging out" tend to be the dregs, those life-forms with lesser potential, and those who reduce their entropy by control, power, and force (so called negative beings). They do not share the industrious ethic of the "cosmic soup kitchen" and occasionally get into altercations with some of the hard working bees and shoppers. In the next field over, there is another similar but different hive (PMR) with its own busy bees.

It is in this larger world that experiences unfold that cannot be appreciated by others who are not operational there - i.e., have not been there many times over a long span in a self directed and controlled way. Thus, descriptions of these experiences hold nothing but entertainment value. Stories of the hive are by comparison relatively dull (as soup kitchens tend to be) and of very little value -- (more or less irrelevant) to anyone except for their dubious ability to quench intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity with no purpose other than developing the illusion of security and personal satisfaction that comes with being in the know reminds me of news junkies who devour 10 to 16 hours of news every day. To what purpose - is anything more than ego served?

Now, don't read too much fine detail into my images and metaphors; my one or two paragraph descriptions of broad swaths of reality are to paint a general picture in broad strokes as accurately as I can in a way that is understandable, not to assign exact color and intensity to each pixel.

Tom C

Hmmm.
I can see one vital difference between ants, bees and social workers in a cosmic soup kitchen.
Colony insects are programmed for their role and are all they ever will be as individual units of the collective. (group evolution only)
A social worker volunteers for their role, sees it as vital to the community, and grows and changes both individually and collectively with the group they joined by a free will choice. (both the individual and the group evolve)
Much better pictures for us PMR folks. A little social work (not infinite) couldn't hurt your average, upwardly mobile, individuated consciousness unit :)

_________________
always, John

I loved the soup kitchen analogy. I found humor in it too. I guess working as a cosmic soup kitchen social worker pays better than a PMR one. Probably less stressful too. Well, less stressful as long as they're not working with a bone-headed human like me.

Tom, going back up a few posts to the DO loop analogy. My computer knowledge isn't very broad but does that mean that for each iteration, or lifetime, as long as the experience provided growth (like a true result in a DO loop) another iteration or lifetime is initiated for that personality? When growth is lacking or negative (like a false result) the process is halted. I think that is what you mean judging by the other statements in this thread. That makes a lot of sense.

I see the process fractal at work here. Just as our oversouls are chips off of the old AUM block, so is each personality a chip off of our oversoul. Just as our oversouls are not destroyed by a reunion with AUM so are we not terminated automatically by reunion with our oversoul. Of course, all are of the one consciousness to begin with so all this division is highly subjective.

Ramon

Stroker,
Don't want to be a colony insect, huh? Who says they don't have individual personalities? Didn't you see the movies "Ants" and "A bugs life"? Does a colony of upwardly mobile social workers manning a soup kitchen sound any better? Would it make a better movie?

Raymon,
I think you've got it.

Tom C


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