Session 641

Personal Reality, Session 641

A man who makes a statue uses his conscious mind, his creative abilities, his physical body, and the inner resources of his own being.

Deliberately he decides to create a sculpture, and automatically focuses his energies in that direction.  When you form the living sculpture of your body, which is far more important to you than any work of art, you should certainly follow the same course.  In other words, direct your energies toward the creation of a healthy functioning body.  You form your image constantly; as many of the artistic processes are hidden, so the inner mechanisms by which you create your material self lie beneath the surface of your conscious mind.  They are highly effective, nevertheless.

As the creation of any art is intimately connected with the dream state, so is the living art of your body.  Its breathing form is influenced by the great therapy of dreams.  If there are chemical imbalances they are often corrected quite automatically in the dream state, as you act out situations calling up the production of hormones, say, that would be summoned in a like waking situation.

The role-playing in the dream drama would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to being with.  Dreams of a strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension.  By such constant dream therapy, both body and mind regulate themselves to a large degree.  So your flesh is affected by your dreams.

In them of course one object may be a symbol, but there is no such thing as an overall statement of dream symbolism, in which a given symbol will have a general meaning.  There are too many variations in personal experience.  It is true that in dreams you do reach some of the deepest sources of your being at times, but even there, the expression of that being is far too individualistic to assign the same kind of “unconscious” meaning to overall symbols.

Again, there can be a useful analogy in the field of art.  While artists all use the same “material” – the human experience – it is still the brilliant uniqueness or individuality pointing out and riding upon that shared human performance that makes a work “great”.  Afterward the critics may point out patterns, assign the work to a certain school, connect the images or symbols to those in other paintings – and then make the mistake of believing the symbols to be general, always apt, meaning the same thing wherever they are found.  But all of this may have little to do with the artist’s interpretation of his own symbols, or with his personal experience, so he may wonder how the critics could read this into his work.

With dreams the same is true.  No one really knows their meaning but yourself.  If you read books in which you are told that a certain object always represents such and such, then you are like the artist who accepts the critic’s idea of the symbols in his own work.  You will feel alienated from your dreams since you are trying to make them follow a pattern that is not yours.

In any case, interpretation involves but one part of the task as you try to consciously assess a dream’s meaning.  The real work of the dream is done during the event itself, on deep psychic and biological levels.

The dream’s happening affects your entire physical condition, and so has this constant therapeutic effect.  This result stems from the psychic situation set up within any dream drama, and in it the problems or challenges of your existence are worked out.  Many probable actions are taken; these are then projected into the probable future.

As you come to understand the nature of your own beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively for your conscious purposes.  It is one of the most efficient natural therapies, and the inner framework in which much of your physical body building actually takes place.

There is another consideration involving medicine; though as I mentioned earlier (in the 624^th session from Chapter Five), if you accept Western medical beliefs I am not suggesting that you suddenly forsake all doctors.  But naturally and left alone, any chemical upsets in the body will right themselves after the inner problems causing them are worked out through any of a variety of innate healing methods.

The new balance signals the organism that an inner problem has been resolved.  The body, mind and psyche are then more or less operating together.  When new psychic challenges arise, another round of natural therapy begins in rhythmic pattern.  When imbalances of a physical nature are removed by the introduction of drugs, however, the body signals say that the dilemma must have been taken care of also – while this may not be the case at all.

The whole organism is not at one with itself under such conditions.  The problem manifested itself in a given way, and the drugs then block that normal expression of the psychic disorder.  Other pathways of demonstration will be sought.

If these are blocked in the same manner also, then the entire mind-body relationship becomes alienated from itself.  The inner mechanics are disturbed.  The basic challenge not only is not faced, but is constantly denied the physical expression that, left alone, would bring about its natural solution.

Obviously there are many ramifications here, and in your society your own belief systems must also be taken into consideration.  If you do not believe in the natural healing processes you will simply block them.  Your fear of not seeing a doctor then will only cause more damage.  On the other hand, if you have faith in medical help, this alone will bring therapeutic benefit.

This can only go so far, though, if the inner problems are not dealt with.  Often they are resolved regardless of what you do or believe, simply as a result of the vast creative energies within your being, and the system of checks and balances with which you provided your body at birth.

The same applies to mental conditions, which have a way, sometimes, of working themselves out better without your professional therapies than with them – often cures happen in spite of your best-intentioned treatment.  One of the latest ideas is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances.  Supplying these does result in some improvement, but such inequalities do not cause any disease.  Your beliefs about the nature of your own reality do.  If medication of that sort improves the immediate situation, the inner problem of beliefs must still be worked out.  Otherwise other illnesses will be substituted.

It is extremely difficult to work with yourself in the natural manner when you are surrounded everywhere by the belief that certain drugs, or foods, or doctors will provide the answers.  So, in the barrage of mass ideas to the opposite, those who try to allow themselves the benefit of their own innate healing must usually face the stress of wondering whether or not they are right.

Unfortunately, the more you rely upon exterior methods the more it seems you must rely upon them, and the less you trust your own natural abilities.  You will often become “allergic” to a drug simply because the body realizes that if the drug was accepted, all recourse to the solution of a particular problem would be cut off, or another more severe illness would result from the physical “cover-up” of the dilemma.

Natural therapy, therefore, is difficult to achieve to its fullest benefit in your society, because it is constantly interfered with from the time of your birth.  Yet it operates regardless of interference, and is always at your command to give health and vitality to the living sculpture in which you have your present experience.

Mental “diseases” often point out the nature of your beliefs as they agree or conflict with those held by others.  Here the belief systems are different than those of society to such a degree that obvious effects show in terms of behavior.  There are crisis points here as with many physical illnesses, and left alone an individual may well work through to his own solution.

Even with so-called mental disorders, however, orientation with the body is very important, as are the individual’s beliefs about his own form and its relationship with others and with time and space.  There will often be chemical imbalances in such a situation, unconsciously produced by the individual, sometimes in order to allow him to work out a series of hallucinatory events.  Such sustained “objectified dreaming” necessitates a change, chemically, from the normal state of waking consciousness.  It is important to note that regardless of the mental or physical illness adopted, it is chosen for a reason, and is a natural method that the individual himself knows he is physically and mentally equipped to handle.

Personality differences then obviously have a great deal to do with the kind of illness adopted, or the “mars” you may inflict upon our own living sculpture.

Now the inner problems that you encounter are always constructive – challenges leading you toward greater fulfillment.

A problem caused by guilt, for example, physically materialized as a malady, is meant to lead you to face and conquer the idea of guilt, the belief in it that you hold in your conscious mind.  The body itself is always in a state of becoming.  You think of it as reaching a certain peak and then deteriorating, or becoming less.  That is because you do not understand it as the expression of your being in flesh.

It reflects the seasons of the earth and of the flesh.  In what you think of as you, it mirrors one condition with great faithfulness and abandon.  In old age it does the same thing.  It shows you in flesh, both as you come into it and leave it, and here you see great variation.  Many cease creating their bodies and die at a young age for a great variety of reasons, of course, but some die because they believe that old age is shameful and that only a young body can be beautiful.

Your beliefs about age, therefore, will affect your body and all of its capacities.  As mentioned earlier in this book (in the 627^th session in Chapter Six), you may become hard of hearing because you firmly believe that this must come with age.  You will alter the chemical composition of your body according to your beliefs about its activity through the various portions of your life.

Elements, chemicals, cells, atoms and molecules – these partially compose your living sculpture, but you are the one who directs their activity through your conscious beliefs, which then initiate all of those great creative powers that give your body its life, and insure its constant reflection of the self that you believe you are.