Session 613

Nature of Personal Reality, Session 613

Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your inner psyche.  Then you perceive this experience.  Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback.  Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances.

There is no other valid way of changing physical events.  It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know.  Simply put, you do exactly this.  Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.

You change even the most permanent-seeming conditions of your life constantly through the varying attitudes you have toward them.  There is nothing in your exterior experience that did not originate within you.

In this existence you are learning to handle the inexhaustible energy that is available to you.  The mass condition of the world, and the situation of each individual in it, is the materialization of man’s progress as he forms his world.

The joy of creativity flows through you as effortlessly as your breath.  From it the most minute areas of your outer experience spring.  Your feelings have electromagnetic realities that rise outward, affecting the atmosphere itself.  They group through attraction, building up areas of events and circumstances that finally coalesce, so to speak, either in matter as objects – or as events in “time”.

Some feelings and thoughts are translated into structures that you call objects; these exist, in your terms, in a medium you call space.  Others are translated instead into psychological structures called events, that seem to exist in a medium you call time.

Space and time are both root assumptions, which simply means that man accepts both, and assumes that his reality is rooted in a series of moments and a dimension of space.  So your inner experience is translated in those terms.

Even the duration of an event or object in space or time is determined by the intensity of the thoughts or emotions that gave it birth.  Duration in space is not the same as duration in time, however, though it may seem that this is the case.  I am speaking in your terms now.  An event or object that exists briefly in space may have a much greater duration in time.  It may have far greater importance and intensity, existing in your memory, for example, long after it has disappeared in space.  Such an event or object does not merely exist symbolically within your mind or memory – but in your terms its actual reality continues as a time event.

Nor is its reality in space annihilated as long as it exists within your mind.  Let us take a very simple example.  A child has been told not to play with a doll.  The order is disobeyed.  The child, wittingly or unwittingly, breaks the doll, and it is thrown away.  The doll exists in time quite vitally as long as the child or the adult-to-be remembers it.

If the doll sat on a bureau and this is also vividly recalled, then the space in which the doll sat still carries the impression of the doll, though other objects may be placed there.  You react, therefore, not only to what is visible to your physical eyes in space, or to what is directly in front of you in time, but also to objects and events whose reality is still with you, though they may seem to have disappeared.

Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality.  Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations.  Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.

They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you.  You are what happens to you.  Your emotional feelings are often transitory, but beneath there are certain qualities of feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical chords.  While your day-to-day feelings may rise or fall, these characteristic feeling-tones lie beneath.

Sometimes they rise to the surface, but in great long rhythms.  They are instead tones of your being.  They represent the most inner portion of your experience.  This does not mean that they are hidden from you, or are meant to be.  It simply means that they represent the core from which you form your experience.

If you have become afraid of emotion or the expression of feeling, or if you have been taught that the inner self is no more than a repository of uncivilized impulses, then you may have the habit of denying this deep rhythm.  You may try to operate as if it did not exist, or even try to refute it.  But it represents your deepest, most creative impulses; to fight against it is like trying to swim upstream against a strong current.

These feeling-tones, then, pervade your being.

They are the form your spirit takes when combined with flesh.  From them, from their core, your flesh arises.

Everything that you experience has consciousness, and each consciousness is endowed with its own feeling-tone.  There is great cooperation involved in the formation of the earth as you think of it, and so the individual living structures of the planet rise up from the feeling-tone within each atom and molecule.

Your flesh springs about you in response to these inner chords of your being, and the trees, rocks, seas and mountains spring up as the body of the earth from the deep inner chords within the atoms and molecules, which are also living.  Because of the creative cooperation that exists, the miracle of physical materialization is performed so smoothly and automatically that consciously you are not aware of your part in it.

The feeling-tone then is the motion and fiber – the timber – the portion of your energy devoted to your physical experience.  Now it flows into what you are as a physical being and materializes you in the world of seasons, space, flesh, and time.  Its source, however, is quite independent of the world that you know.

Once you learn to get the feeling of your own inner tone, then you are aware of its power, strength and durability, and you can to some extent ride with it into deeper realities of experience.

The incredible emotional richness and variety and splendor of physical experience is the material reflection of this inner feeling-tone.  It pervades the events in your life, the overall inner direction, the quality of perception.  It fills up and illuminates the individual aspects of your life, and largely determines the pervasive subjective climate in which you dwell.

It is the essence of yourself.  Its sweeps are broad in range, however.  It does not determine, for example, specific events.  It paints the colors in the large “landscape” of your experience.  It is the feeling of yourself, inexhaustible.

In other terms it represents the expression of yourself in pure energy, from which your individuality rises, the You of you, unmistakably given identity that is never duplicated.

This energy comes from the core of BEING, from All That Is, and represents the source of never-ending vitality.  It is Being, Being in You.  As such, all of the energy and power of Being is focused and reflected through you in the direction of your three-dimensional existence.

While your feeling-tone is uniquely yours, still it is expressed in a certain fashion that is shared by all consciousness focused in physical reality.  So in those terms you spring from the earth as all the other creatures and natural living structures.  You are, while physical, a portion of nature, therefore, not apart from it.

Trees and rocks possess their own consciousness, and also share a gestalt consciousness, even as the living portions of your body.  The cells and organs have their own awarenesses, and a gestalt one.  So the race of man also has individual consciousness and a gestalt or mass consciousness, of which you individually are hardly aware.

The mass race consciousness, in its terms, possesses an identity.  You are a portion of that identity while still being unique, individual and independent.  You are confined only to the extent that you have chosen physical reality, and so placed yourself within its context of experience.  While physical, you follow physical laws, or assumptions.  These form the framework for corporeal expression.

Within this framework you have full freedom to create your experience, your personal life in all of its aspects, the living picture of the world.  Your personal life, and to some extent your individual living experience, help create the world as it is known in your time.

In this book we will be speaking about your own subjective world, and your part in the creation of events both private and shared.  It is important before we continue that you realize that consciousness is within all physical phenomena, however.  It is vital that you realize your position within nature.  Nature is created from within.  The personal life that you know rises up from within you, yet it is given.  Since you are a part of Being, then in a certain fashion you give yourself the life that is being lived through you.

You make your own reality.  There is no other rule.  Knowing this is the secret of creativity.

I have spoken of “you”, yet this must not be confused with the “you” that you often think you are – the ego alone, for the ego is only a portion of You; it is that expert part of your personality that deals directly with the contents of your conscious mind, and is concerned most directly with the material portions of your experience.

The ego is a very specialized portion of your greater identity.  It is a portion of you that arises to deal directly with the life that the larger You is living.  The ego can feel cut off, lonely and frightened, however, if the conscious mind lets the ego run away with it.  The ego and the conscious mind are not the same thing.  The ego is composed of various portions of the personality – it is a combination of characteristics, ever-changing, that act in a unitary fashion – the portion of the personality that deals most directly with the world.

The conscious mind is an excellent perceiving attribute, a function that belongs to inner awareness but in this case is turned outward toward the world of events.  Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward.  Left alone, it perceives clearly.

In certain terms, the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives, or the focus through which it views physical reality.  But the conscious mind automatically changes its focus throughout life.  The ego, while appearing the same to itself, ever changes.  It is only when the conscious mind becomes rigid in its direction, or allows the ego to take on some of its own functions, that difficulties arise.  Then the ego allows the conscious mind to work in certain directions and blocks its awareness in others.

And so it is from your larger identity that you form the reality that you know.  It is up to you to do this with joy and vigor, clearing your conscious mind so that the deeper knowledge of your greater identity can form joyous expressions in the world of flesh.