Session 640

Personal Reality, Session 640

There are natural feedback systems within the body and psyche that operate to set up optimum frameworks of balance, in which your growth and development can take place.  There is some difference here, which was mentioned earlier (in the 636^th session in Chapter Nine), between you and the animals and the particular way in which you create your reality.

In man, conscious thoughts are highly important as the directors of unconscious activity.  You become more responsible, then in a particular way for physical effects that, comparatively speaking, are “instinctive” in the animal.  This gives you both a conscious and unconscious feedback system against which to test your experience and alter its nature.

Therapeutic systems are an important part of this interrelationship, and they operate constantly.  In one way, a state of grace or illumination happens where there is the greatest poised balance of the conscious mind with either levels of the psyche and body – a biological and spiritual recognition of the individual’s wholeness within himself and his relationship with the universe at large.

Such states lead to a condition of mental, psychic and physical health and efficiency.  The aware mind’s great leeway through the intellect, and its connection with the senses, makes it possible for any singly insignificant event to trigger such experience.  Intense focus is a characteristic of the conscious mind, and you can call it narrow because it includes only the physical dimension; but within the scope of the corporeal field it has great freedom to interpret the given dimension in any way it chooses.

The conscious mind can, for instance, see a rose as a symbol of life or death, or joy or sadness, and under certain conditions its interpretation of a simple flower can trigger deep experiences that call up power and strength from the inner resources of being.  Since the attributes of egotistical consciousness have been so misinterpreted, you usually consider it only in its analytical breaking-down functions.  These are very important as it separates larger fields of perception into smaller ones that can be physically understood.  But the conscious mind is also a great synthesizer.  It brings together diverse elements from your experience and unites them in new patterns.

These organizations then serve as awakeners or stimulation to inner portions of the self, always providing it with fresh experience.  The inner self responds through the richness of its own psychic fabric, sending up, so to speak, ever-new particularized abilities to meet the exterior circumstances.

When your body and mind are working together then the relationship between the two goes smoothly, and their natural therapeutic systems place you in a state of health and grace.  I told you earlier (in the 614^th session in Chapter Two, for instance) that your feelings follow the flow of your beliefs, and if this does not seem true to you it is because you are not aware of the contents of your conscious mind.  You can close your physical eyes.  You can close the eyes of your conscious mind also, and pretend not to see what is there.  It is because you do not trust your own basic therapeutic nature, or really understand the conscious or unconscious mind, that you run to so many therapies that originate from without the self.

It seems that technologies and inventions have done a lot of harm, and so they have.  On the other hand technology brings within your reach the great therapy of music; this activates the inner living cells of your body, stimulates the energy of the inner self and helps to unite the conscious mind with the other portions of your being.

Music is an exterior representation, and an excellent one, of the life-giving inner sounds that act therapeutically within your body all the time.  (See Chapter Five.)  The music is a conscious reminder of those deeper inner rhythms, both of sound and of motion.  Listening to music that you like will often bring images into your mind that show you your conscious beliefs in different form.

The natural healing of sound can happen also when you do such a simple thing as listen to rain.  You do not need drugs, hypnotism, or even meditation.  You only need to allow and direct the freedom of your conscious mind.  Left alone, it will flow through thoughts and images that provide their own therapy.

You often avoid this natural treatment, however, and run from frightening conscious thoughts that would in their turn lead you to the source of “negative” beliefs, where they could be faced; you could then travel through them, so to speak, into feelings of joy and victory.  Instead, for example, many of you accept the way of drugs, where such feelings and thoughts are thrust upon you, or forced out of you while you are denied the stabilizing comforts of the conscious mind.

Dreams are one of your greatest natural therapies, and one of your most effective assets as connectors between the interior and exterior universes.

Usually they are not analyzed according to your [own] current beliefs.  You have been taught to interpret them along the lines of very ritualized procedures.  You are told, for instance, that certain objects or images in your dreams have a definite meaning – not necessarily your own, but following whatever psychological, mystical or religious school of thought in which you happen to be interested.

Some of these systems do touch upon legitimate portions of reality, but they all overlook the great individualistic and highly private nature of your dreams, and the fact that you create your own reality.

Fire has one meaning if you are afraid of it, another if you consider it a source of warmth; and either of these two meanings will also be colored by any of the endless variations of personal events that any individual might have encountered with it.  Your own knowledge of dream symbols and their personal meaning is so opaque simply because you are not used to examining them with your conscious mind.  You have been taught that it cannot understand.  The great interconnections between waking and dreaming experience then escape you.  You do not realize the many physical problems that are solved for you, and by you, in your dreams.

This happens very frequently when you consciously set the problem before yourself, state it clearly, and then drift into sleep.  The same thing happens, however, even without such a conscious set.  Dreams give you all kinds of information concerning the state of your body, the world at large, and the probable exterior conditions that your present beliefs will bring about.

The dream state provides you with a trial framework in which you explore probable actions and decide upon the ones you want to physically materialize.  Not only nightmares, as mentioned earlier (in the last session), but many other dreams follow rhythms of a therapeutic nature far more effectively than any that are drug-induced.  Sleeping pills can interfere with this activity.

I will have quite a bit to say in this book concerning the creative and healing nature of dreams, and the easy methods that can be used to help you utilize those conditions more effectively.  Here I merely want to point out some of the natural doorways to self-illumination and states of grace.  These can be alternative courses to those who believe that there is no other way but to browbeat the ego – either through the use of chemicals or by other methods calculated to strip it of its powers at least momentarily, rather than teaching it to use those great abilities of assimilation that it does possess.

Your nature, beside possessing natural, general healing abilities, has its own unique and particular private triggers arising from your experience.  They can be learned, recognized and utilized by you.

In this area certain events really matter.  Singular circumstances, meaningless to others, can be used to open your own storehouse of energy and inner strength.  These will include both waking and dreaming events.  If you remember having certain dream experiences and waking refreshed, then before sleep consciously think about those dreams and tell yourself they will return.

If any activity, odd or silly as it might seem, brings you a sense of satisfaction, pursue it.  Any of these natural healing methods can even lead beyond feelings of well-being and strength, physical health and vitality, to those sublime experiences of illumination and grace.

Enjoyment of art is also very therapeutic, and its creation springs from an exquisite wedding of the conscious and unconscious minds.  I will try later to explain the deep interweaving that exists between dreams, creativity, and the nature of the reality of your experience.

The most rejuvenating idea of all, and the greatest step to any true illumination, is the realization that your exterior life springs from the invisible world of your reality through your conscious thoughts and beliefs, for then you realize the power of your individuality and identity.  You are immediately presented with choices.  You can no longer see yourself as a victim of circumstances.  Yet the conscious mind arose precisely to open up choices, to free you from a one-road experience, to let you use your creativity to form diversified, varied comprehensions.

You cannot, as an instance, tell yourself vehemently, “I want to receive illumination”, and expect it to happen if all of your beliefs actually go in the other direction.

You may feel unworthy or believe such a state impossible for you to achieve, in which case you are sending contradictory messages.  Nor can you become concerned with the ways in which your conscious purposes will be unconsciously produced, for the inner workings are not aware phenomena.

The framework of sex is another natural therapeutic system if you not already hampered its effectiveness by contrary beliefs.  Natural “mystical” experience, unclothed in dogma, is the original religious therapy that is so often distorted in ecclesiastical organizations, but it represents man’s innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own being, and of his own experience.

The soul is not only dressed in chemical clothes, but wears the apparel woven from all of the elements of the earth.  As physical creatures you will be partially changed by any chemical or element, or food or drug that becomes part of your living system, but those effects will follow the nature of your beliefs.

Your dreams and the physical events of your lives constantly alter the chemical balances within your body.  A dream may be purposely experienced to provide an outlet of a kind that is missing in your daily life.  It will mobilize your resources and fill your body with a rush of needed hormones, creating a dream state of stress that will bring the organism’s healing abilities into combat and result in an end to particular physical symptoms.

Another dream might provide a “dreaming” peaceful interlude in which all stress is minimized, with the overactive output of certain hormones and chemicals quieted as a result.

Such dreams will be greatly effective, but only for a short period of time unless the conscious mind faces the beliefs that have been causing the imbalance.  The heavy doses of chemicals introduced from the outside, however, give you an entirely different kind of situation and add new stresses.  These dilemmas condition consciousness to believe its position to be even more precarious than it was before, and its sense of power and effectiveness is greatly reduced.

Consciousness’s experiences following such therapy may be those of elation, but it feels that any of its adventures rest on issues that it cannot understand and its capacity to deal with physical reality is less secure than before.  This is not the case with natural inner treatments that are carried on in individual behavior.  These are the ones that should be understood and encouraged, say, by the psychologists.

Your body is your own living sculpture – not only the shape, structure and nature of its form, but the miraculous sense-knowing of its being and the unique effect it has upon others.  The sculpture itself is also endowed with the power of creativity given to it by yourself.

Those innate bodily abilities also help sustain you as you continually create the image.  The source for all of this creativity springs from your own inner identity, which is never completely materialized in flesh, and so you always have unused portions of creativity at your command.  You react to the body even though you form it.  In those terms there is a constant interaction between the creation and the creator, and in three-dimensional reality the creator is so a part of his handiwork that it is difficult to tell one from the other.

A painter puts part of himself into a painting.  You put all of you of which you are aware into your body, so that it becomes you in flesh.  An artist loves his painting.  In physical terms it is completed when he puts down his brush – at least for him, though its effects continue.  But you are creating your material image as long as you live, and manifesting yourself in it.

A painter does not look out of his creation’s eyes into the room upon whose wall the painting hangs.  But you peer out through your own eyes at the universe.  You create not only the body, then, but its entire experience, the context in which it takes place.  You endow yourself with a three-dimensional existence.  It is the framework in which you have your experience, created by you as the artist gives his paintings their dimension. 

The trees in a landscape painting cannot physically move with the wind that may blow through the three-dimensional room.  The head in a portrait cannot close its eyes if they are open, but you move within the framework of the temporal space that you have created for yourself.

The features in a portrait are painted on canvas or board, but your soul is not painted on your body.  It enters into and becomes part of it.  Physically, you cannot contain all of your identity, and that “free” portion unconsciously creates the flesh, in your terms.  Again, you direct its form through your beliefs, but the unconscious part of you does the “work” of producing it.