Rita's World is a conversation between friends in two worlds: Rita Warren, now in the non-physical world, Frank DeMarco, still in the body. While Rita was alive, the two had engaged in weekly sessions in which Rita had asked Frank questions about life, ranging from the simplest to the most profound. He had answered from an altered state of consciousness, speaking for the non-physical beings they called "the guys upstairs" or "TGU." Those sessions were made into a book, The Sphere and the Hologram, after she died in 2008. Now, seven years after she made her transition out of the physical life (3D), she returns to the same subjects with a different perspective...from her world now.

Is life meaningful? Are we somehow important to the world? Is there a way for us in 3D to visualize and understand the non-3D world?

Rita's World answers these questions. Flowing as simply and easily as a conversation between friends, it offers the reader a new way to see the world. It puts the center of life back where it belongs, after centuries of incomplete and misleading answers. What's more, it shows people by example how to find out for themselves what their life really is, and what it really amounts to.

Those who were fascinated by Seth or Edgar Cayce will like this book.

Frank DeMarco has been writing about his conversations with non-physical beings for more than two decades in magazine articles, lectures, video interviews, and books. His dozen volumes dealing with various aspects of communication with the non-physical world include Awakening from the 3D World, Rita's World Vol. I and II, The Cosmic Internet, and Imagine Yourself Well, all published by Rainbow Ridge Books. The author resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Contents

Introduction

December 2014

Correcting the picture • Continuous communication • Communities and distinctions • Dimensions • Everything lives • Redefinition • Guidance • Resonance and proof • Individuals as flames • Continuity and individuality • Time and change • Continuity by intent • Reality as net • Past-life review? • Translation • The nature of time • Our experience of time • One reality, not two • Communicating • A change in consciousness • Bridges, not monuments • Orientations • Cooperation

January 2015

Past-life reviews • Levels of consciousness • Higher intelligence • Soulmaking • Your soul’s heredity • Experiencing the nonphysical • Visualizing the afterlife • Rita’s experience • 3D and non-3D • How to receive new material • Experiencing the larger being • Compound beings and unitary beings • A research project • Consciousness as a condition of life • Consciousness and awareness • The switching mechanism • “Called or not called . . .” • Viewpoint • Brain v. mind • Uncountable versions • Walking the possibilities • Manifesting possibilities • Language in the non-3D • Simultaneous v. sequential perceptions • There is no supernatural • Time in non-3D • Emotions in non-3D

February 2015

Unlived potential • The shadow • A chat group • Reorientation and faith • Perceiving higher dimensions • Considering good and evil • Language as a problem • Tastes and values • Pure good, and pure evil • Duality in non-3D • Duality and scripture • Maps and explorers • Good and evil in non-3D • Combining scales • Scaling • Three forms of evil • Evil as external • Evil as attractive nuisance • Evil as compulsion • Angels and humans • An undivided reality • Discovering unconscious assumptions • Defining the larger being • Love and fear in duality • No reincarnation? • Memory • Is 3D functioning correctly? • Cruelty and suffering • The justice of the world • Controversy • Delusions of competence • Hidden relationships • Choosing your attitude A survey cruise • An assumption of separation • A compass • Suffering as by-product • Modes of operation • Pain as feedback • Unsuspected background influences • The real nature of tragedy • What is it for? • Context • Choice and free will • Choice • Mirrors • Cognitive impairment • Autism • Non-3D life and the 3D world • Non-3D’s stake • What non-3D cares about • Fishing • “What would I ask?” • Higher dimensions? • Compound and unitary beings • Limitations on communication • Words and the non-3D • Living in communication • Unique windows • The purpose of creation • Manifesting the non-3D  being • Openness to guidance • Soulmates and resonance • Spirits contend • Passion • Q&A • Living our values • Aggression • Being and doing • Pole stars • Communication • Authority • Consistency • Preventive maintenance • Paths • Bees and hives • Sexual reproduction • 3D and non-3D

Afterword

"A good read for people who are curious about what the afterlife might hold and want to hear from a wide variety of different viewpoints."

Dedication

Of course, to the memory of

Rita Q. Warren

As I knew her in her last years,

the wise old woman on the hill,

the soft-spoken friend to explorers,

the teacher so beloved by so many students,

the scholar still quietly, doggedly,

pursuing her research.

But dedicated, equally,

to Rita

as I experience her now,

wiser and young again, with wider horizons,

still a loyal friend to explorers,

still the beloved, skillful teacher,

now living what she said would be her ideal life—

endless research and no reports to write up!

Introduction

This is the record of a series of conversations between two old friends, one of them no longer in the body. Rita and I were beginning again where we had left off, still looking for clarity about life, and the afterlife, and the reality behind appearances.

That needs explaining.

Rita Warren was the first director of the consciousness laboratory at The Monroe Institute (TMI). Over a period of four years, she and her husband, Martin, conducted hundreds of sessions on volunteers in the Institute’s isolation booth, or black box, using Monroe’s sonic technology to assist them into altered states of consciousness. During those sessions, Rita had sometimes asked the volunteers about the afterlife and other aspects of reality, but when she retired after directing the lab for four years, her curiosity remained unsatisfied.

She and I met shortly after I moved to the New Land community (adjacent to the Institute) in 1998, but we didn’t really get to know each other until after Martin died in April 2000. After that, she and I made a point of having Saturday evening supper together at a certain restaurant in nearby Lovingston. We were very different. At age 80, she was 26 years my senior and she had had a distinguished academic career, as opposed to my background in journalism and book publishing. But we had had similar experiences with TMI residential programs, and we were equally interested in the hidden nature of things. The many months of weekly dinners, and emails and phone calls, and shared stories and jokes, all served to build a comfortable relationship between us, based on trust. This would become important.

In the autumn of 2000, I did a series of ten exploratory sessions in the black box and posted the transcripts to a group of email friends, naturally including Rita. Our Saturday evening dinners often centered on discussion of that information. A few months later, at her suggestion, she and I began to do weekly sessions together in her home after I had gotten home from work and had had supper. And that is how, on Tuesday night, August 8, 2001, she began looking for answers to the questions that had long interested her.

Over the course of many months of weekly sessions with “the guys upstairs,” Rita and I were given a new way (1) to see the world, (2) to change our lives and, as you will see, (3) to thereby change the world. This promise is not overstated but is, if anything, an understatement.

Anyone who does any serious exploring into the question of “what is real and what is not” is soon presented with difficulties. It is difficult to envision life on “the other side.” How do beings there spend their time? What is it they do, and why do they do it? What if anything is their relationship to us? For that matter, what is our life all about? Could such questions be answered? Well yes, as it turned out, they could be.

Rita later told me that neither she nor Martin had ever gotten answers equal in clarity and consistency to what we got from what I called “the guys upstairs.” Session by session, week upon week, the guys introduced certain themes, and built upon them, until after a few months Rita and I were living in a very different world. I started to edit the sessions for publication and got Rita to write an introduction, but by the time The Sphere and the Hologram came out, she had already made her transition. She died March 19, 2008 and came to me in a dream to assure me that she was fine, and then for six and a half years I assumed our work together was over.

So when, in December 2014, I dreamed of her saying she was ready for us to work together again, I was surprised, but pleased. The next morning, I sat down with my journal and announced myself ready. I was prepared for anything or nothing, as usual in this business of communicating.

What makes me think that I can talk to the dead, or that the dead could talk to me—or would want to? Common sense certainly suggests otherwise.

The trouble is, “common sense” depends upon unstated assumptions:

1. That the past is gone and the future is not yet created, and that the present is all that exists;

2. That the dead either cease to exist or exist beyond the range of the living.

Neither assumption is true. Centuries of recorded experience, including the world’s scriptures, testifies to people seeing the future and communicating with the dead. We think of the dead as gone; but in fact, their souls live on, as alive as when they were here, but outside of time and space. Being outside of time and space, all times and all spaces are available to them. This is how, when we communicate with them, they can know what we know (interacting with our minds “from the inside” so to speak) and can react to that knowledge. This is why we can communicate with them about the things in our life.

So who is it are we interacting with? It isn’t always possible to know, and it isn’t always necessary to know. A message has to stand on its own, to resonate or not, rather than lean on someone’s presumed authority. Sometimes I think I recognize the presence of this or that specific individual, but I try to remain aware that what I think I know may or may not be true. I proceed on that understanding, and so should you. The Rita I connect to is not the entire person, any more than anyone is the entire person to anyone, ever. We relate to each other according to who we each are. Some traits and interests are shared, some are not. There never has been and never will be a relationship without mystery. How could there be? But can we at least prove that when we think we are talking to the dead, we aren’t just making it up as we go along? The short answer is no, we can’t. There’s very little we can prove about the source of any kind of knowledge, be it ever so conventional. No matter what we think we know, it can never be absolutely true, and what is true in one context may be untrue in another. Our scientific outlook, our religious outlook, our anti-scientific or anti-religious outlook, whatever, can only be provisional. That’s just the way it is, and you might as well get used to it.

Instead, the question that matters is, “Does the information resonate? Is it helpful?” If so, what difference does it make if it comes from another life or from another part of your own mind unsuspected by you? You just need to be careful about what you’re ready to believe.

Explorers by definition move into poorly mapped or unmapped territory, and by their own experience help fill in the map for those who follow. All that can be required is that they be resolute, honest, and a bit skeptical even of the maps they themselves help to draw. It cannot be required of them that they always know what they are doing or where they are going. If you were to stick to “respectable” or “commonsense” explanations and pathways, what kind of exploring would that be? Sometimes you have to just keep on going and trust that eventually things will sort out. Exploring is the only alternative to either taking things on faith or refusing to think about them at all.

Any culture’s scriptures deal with interaction between the physical and the nonphysical aspects of the world. The problems, the techniques, the models are, after all, just so many varieties of packaging. The reality remains the same. But old words go dead on new generations, and so old truths have to be restated to be heard. In our time, neither science nor religion is conveying a picture of the afterlife that we can relate to. Neither the believers nor the materialists provide us with a credible picture of the meaning and nature of life. So where can we find one? Direct communication with the other side of life, the nonphysical side, is as close to firsthand information as we can get, at least until we ourselves drop the body and cross over. In the course of these conversations, I received information that builds an intellectually respectable model of our lives in the physical and nonphysical world. It has been a-building for fifteen years, but my sessions with Rita are the clearest exposition so far.

At some point in December, it occurred to me that we should proceed more carefully, and I proposed a collaboration to my friend Charles Sides. I have easy access, and years of practice, talking to people who are not in the physical, and Rita and I were emotionally close for the last eight years of her life, so clearly I would be the right guy to get the information. But I knew Charles to be the right guy to structure the questions and followup questions and to outline the resulting material. He has spent a lifetime formulating the questions and examining the answers that have come out of the East. All that background knowledge would inform his questions, because a lifetime’s research had formed his mind and his way of seeing the world. It seemed to me that together we might be able to do what neither of us could do alone.

I asked him to pose questions one by one, and then either pose other questions, or ask follow-ups, whichever seemed appropriate. He agreed with some enthusiasm, so I decided to begin again in the new year. After a short hiatus, Rita and I began again in January, and the information came fast and furious for several weeks, then tapered off, until, by mid-May, we had reached a natural place to pause. This volume carries the conversation through the month of February. Our talks from March into May will comprise volume 2. Rita and I still communicate, and perhaps we will accumulate enough material for books beyond these two, but in any case what yohave in your hand is quite enough material to change your life.