Session 658

Personal Reality, Session 658

Any good demonstration of hypnosis will clearly show that the point of power is in the present, and that beliefs dictate your experience.

There is no magic in hypnosis.  Each of you utilize it constantly.  (See the 620^th session in Chapter Four.)  Only when particular procedures are assigned to it, and when it is set aside from normal life, does hypnotic suggestion seem so esoteric.  Structured hypnosis merely allows the subject to utilize full powers of concentration, thereby activating unconscious mechanisms.

With the distortions present in organized procedures, however, and the misunderstandings of the practitioners, the phenomenon seems to show a different face indeed.  The subject agrees to accept the beliefs of the hypnotist.  Since telepathy exists (as described in Chapter Three), the subject will react not only to verbal commands but to the unspoken beliefs of the practitioner, thereby “proving”, of course, the hypnotist’s theory of what his profession is.

Hypnosis clearly shows in concentrated form the way in which your beliefs affect your behavior in normal life.  The various methods simply focus all of your concentration upon a specific area, shutting out any distractions.

Your beliefs act like a hypnotist, then.  As long as the particular directions are given, so will your “automatic” experience conform.  The one suggestion that can break this is this: “I create my reality, and the present is my point of power”.  If you do not like the effects of a belief you must alter it, for no manipulation of the exterior conditions themselves will release you.  If you truly understand your power of action and decision in the present, then you will not be hypnotized by past events.

Think of the present as a pool of experience drawn from many sources, fed, in your terms, by tributaries from both the past and the future.  There are an infinite number of such tributaries (probabilities), and through your beliefs you choose from these, adjusting their currents.  For example: If you constantly focus on the belief that your early background was damaging and negative, then only such experiences will flow into your present from the past.  It does no good to say, “But my life was traumatic,” therefore reinforcing the belief.  You must in one way or another modify that conviction, or preferably change it entirely – or you will never escape from its effects.  This does not mean “lying” to yourself; but if it seems to you that your background held no joys, accomplishments or pleasures, then you are lying to yourself now.  You have concentrated upon the negative to such a degree that anything else seems invisible.  (See the 644^th session in Chapter Eleven.)  From the present you have hypnotized yourself, viewing the past not as it was to your experience, but as it appears now in the light of your current beliefs.

You have reconstructed it.  So when I tell you to restructure your past, I am not telling you to do something that you have not already done.  Hypnosis, again, is merely a state of concentrated attention, in which you focus upon beliefs.  Popular demonstrations lead the public to believe that the subject must fall asleep or be completely relaxed, yet this is not the case.  The one prerequisite is an intense concentration upon specific incoming data to the exclusion of everything else.  Therefore the orders given are clear-cut, to the point.  No conflicting information is received, no cross messages.

The shutting out of superfluous data and the narrowing of focus are the two most important ingredients.  Relaxation can help simply because the body messages are also quieted, and the mind not concerned with them.

Many beliefs were originally accepted as a result of such a situation, without any formal induction, but when the circumstances were right.  A period of panic induces immediate accelerated concentration.  All the forces of energy are mobilized at once, while little relaxation is usually involved.

On the other hand, such beliefs can be accepted when it appears that the conscious mind is asleep, or dulled as in periods of shock, or during operations.  The focus of attention is narrowed then, and intensified.  One of the troubles is that too specific distinctions are made between the conscious and unconscious minds.  They interlap.  Hypnosis, used properly without the mumbo jumbo usually assigned to it, is an excellent method of inserting new beliefs and getting rid of old ones.  This is only true, however, if you realize the power of your conscious mind in that moment, and understand the ability of your consciousness to mobilize unconscious reactions.

It is of greatest importance that you realize several points before you try the method I suggest.

First of all, the unconscious is not a sponge, indiscriminately accepting material regardless of the considerations of your conscious self.  All beliefs or suggestions are first sifted through your conscious mind, and only those that you accept are then permitted their penetration into the other areas of the self.

No negative beliefs were thrust upon you, therefore, despite your will.  Period.  None can be inflicted upon you that you do not consciously accept.  In formal hypnosis, the hypnotist and the subject play a game.  If the hypnotist orders the subject to forget what happened, the individual will pretend to do so.  In that context both hold the belief in the resulting forgetfulness, and it is the power of belief that is being demonstrated.  But instead this is taken as an indication that the conscious mind is helpless under such conditions, generally speaking, and this is not the case.

Quite without any inductions, you have “hypnotized” yourself into all the beliefs that you have.  This simply means that you have consciously accepted them, focused upon them, excluded data to the contrary, narrowed your interests to those specific points, and accordingly activated the unconscious mechanisms that then materialize those convictions through physical experience.

Formal hypnosis merely brings about an accelerated version of what goes on all the time.  It is a perfect example of the instantaneous results possible ideally – but not usually seen practically – as present beliefs negate past ones.

We are going to deal with practical methods that will allow you to alter beliefs and change your experience.  Later in the book we’ll show how your individual beliefs attract you to joys or disasters.  We will also discuss the ways in which mass beliefs will bring many of you together both in great periods of celebration, or as victims or survivors of disasters that seem to exist apart from yourselves.

Let us first of all discuss the nature of hypnosis, quite natural hypnosis, and the ways in which you use it now.  Then you will see how you can utilize it quite easily and deliberately in your present point of power.

Chapter 16: Natural Hypnosis: A Trance Is A Trance Is A Trance

What is the reality behind reality?  Is physical life a hallucination?  Is there some definable concrete reality, of which your own is a mere shadow?

Your reality is the result of a hallucination, if by this you mean that it is only the picture shown by your senses.  Physically, of course, your existence is perceived through the senses.  In that context corporeal life is an entranced one, with the focus of attention largely concentrated through the senses’ belief in the reality of their sensations.  Yet that experience is the image that reality takes for you now, and so in other terms earthly life is one version of reality – not reality in its entirety, but a part of it.  It is in itself an avenue through which you perceive what reality is.  In order to explore that experience, you direct your attention to it and use all of your other (nonphysical) abilities as corollaries, adjuncts, additions.  You hypnotize your very nerves, and the cells within your body, for they will react as you expect them to react, and the beliefs of your conscious mind are followed in degree by all portions of the self down to the smallest atom and molecule.  The large events of your life, your interactions with others, including the habitual workings of the most minute physical events within your body – all of this follows your conscious belief.

Again, if you are ill you may say, “I did not want to be sick”, or if you are poor, “I did not want to be poor”, of if you are unloved, “I did not want to be lonely”.  Yet for your own reasons you began to believe in illness more than health, in poverty more than abundance, in loneliness rather than affection.

You may have accepted some of these ideas from your parents.  Their effects may have surrounded you, or you may have switched beliefs in one particular area of your life; but each can be changed if you utilize the power of action in the present.  I am not saying that every one of you must or should be healthy, wealthy and wise.  I am only addressing those here now who have effects in their lives with which they are dissatisfied.  In one manner of speaking, then, the suggestions you give yourselves constantly operate overall as beliefs that are reflected in your experience.

Each of you will find habitual thought patterns in your own life backed up by resulting action – conditional behavior as it were – by which you continually reinforce negative aspects, concentrate upon them to the exclusion of conflicting data, and so bring them into experience through natural hypnosis.

Many people assign great power to a hypnotist, yet whenever you have the undivided attention of another, you act as a hypnotist to a large degree.

Whenever you have your own undivided attention you act as a hypnotist and subject simultaneously.  You give yourselves post-hypnotic suggestions all the time, particularly when you project present conditions into the future.  I want to impress upon you the fact that all of this simply follows the natural function of the mind, and to dispel any ideas that you have about the “magical” aspects of hypnosis.

For five or ten minutes a day at the most, then, use natural hypnosis as a method of accepting desired new beliefs.  During that period concentrate your attention as vividly as possible upon one simple statement.  Repeat it over and over while focusing upon it for this time.  Try to feel the statement in whatever way is possible – that is, do not allow distractions, but if your mind insists upon running about then channel its images in line with your declaration.

The repetition, verbally or mentally, is important because it activates biological patterns and reflects them.  Do not strain.  This exercise should not be done along with the point of power exercise given earlier.  (See the 657^th session in Chapter Fifteen).  One should not run into the other, but should be carried out on separate occasions during the day.

During the period, however, do remember that you are using the present as a moment of power to insert new beliefs, and that these will indeed be materialized.  When the exercise is finished do not dwell upon it.  Put it from your mind.  You will have utilized natural hypnosis in a concentrated form.

You may have to experiment some for the proper wording of your message, but three days at the very least are necessary before you can tell, through results, how effective it has been.  A change of wording may be in order.  When you feel right about the statement, then continue it. Your attention should be completely relaxed otherwise, for time is needed.  You may experience spectacular results at once.  But continue the exercise even if this happens.

Inner channels must become repatterned.  There will be a feel to this that will serve as your own individual guideline.  There is no need to continue the practice over ten minutes.  In fact, many will find that difficult to do.  Spending a longer period of time simply reinforces the idea of problems involved.

Session 657

Personal Reality, Session 657

THE PRESENT IS THE POINT OF POWER

The above is one of the most important sentences in this book in practical terms, and working within the framework of time as you understand it.  As mentioned earlier (in the 653^rd session in Chapter Fourteen), you actualize events from the present intersection of spirit and flesh, choosing them from probabilities according to your beliefs.

All of your physical, mental and spiritual abilities are focused together, then, in the brilliant concentration of “present” experience.  You are not at the mercy of the past, or of previous convictions, unless you believe that you are.  If you fully comprehend your power in the present, you will realize that action at that point also alters the past, its beliefs and reactions.

In other words I am telling you that your present beliefs, in a manner of speaking, are like the directions given to the entire personality, simultaneously organizing and reorganizing past experience according to you current concepts of reality.

The future – the probable future – is being altered in the same way, of course.  To look backward for the source of current problems can lead you into the habit of seeking only negative episodes from your past, and prevent you from experiencing it as a source of pleasure, accomplishment, or success.

You are structuring your earlier life through the dissatisfactions of the present, and therefore reinforcing your problems.

It is as if you were reading a history book that was devoted only to failures, cruelties and errors of the race, ignoring all of its accomplishments.  Such practices can lead you to use your own “history” so that it gives a very distorted picture of who and what you are – a picture that then paints your present circumstances.

Those given to such practices – constant examination of the past in order to discover what is wrong in the present – too often miss the point.  Instead, they constantly reinforce the negative experience from which they are trying to escape.  Their initial problems were caused precisely as a result of the same kind of thinking.  A great many unsatisfactory conditions result because individuals become frightened at various periods in their lives, doubt themselves, and begin to concentrate upon “negative” aspects.

The situation may be quite different in some ways.  Large areas of life may not be touched by certain attitudes, while others are.  One person may be completely free physically and in excellent health, and yet, because of certain experiences, begin to doubt his ability to get along with others.  So he may begin to look into his past – with that belief in mind, that he cannot relate – and then find within previous conduct all kinds of reasons to support the idea.

If he journeyed through his memories trying to find a different kind of proof instead, then in that same past he would discover instances when he did relate well with others.  Your present beliefs structure the memories which will parade before you now – and what you remember will then seem to justify the beliefs.

When you are trying to alter your beliefs, look through your past with the new conceptions in mind.  If you are ill, remember when you were not.  Search your life for proofs of your health.  Your very life itself is hard evidence that health is within you!

In almost all cases of present limitation, there is one main theme in that particular area: The individual has schooled himself or herself to stress “negative” aspects, for whatever reasons.

I have frequently said that beliefs cause reality, and that no symptom will simply fade away unless the “reason” is ascertained – but such reasons go far beneath your current ideas of cause and effect.  They involve intimate philosophical value judgments on the part of each individual.  Beneath them, the apparent causes of limitations in personal life, there are other far-reaching beliefs, and each individual will use those elements in his private experience to back these up.  This applies to any kind of lack or hindrance severe enough to be a problem.

You have been taught that you are at the mercy of previous events, so your idea of looking for the source of personal difficulty is to examine the past, but – to find what you did wrong there, or what mistakes occurred there, or what interpretations were made there!  Again, regardless of what you have been taught, the point of power is in the present; and again, your present beliefs will be used to structure your recollections.

Those memories will be used to reach any conclusion, as statistics can be used, for example.  Along the way you may settle for a given remembered event or two, and assign to them the reasons for your present behavior.  If so, you are already prepared to change your current beliefs and mode of action, and simply use the occurrences or habits of the past as a stimulus or motivation.  (See the 616^th session in Chapter Two.)

The question, “What is wrong with me?” will only lead you to create further limitations, and to reinforce those that you do have, through exaggerating such activities in the present and projecting them into the future.

Which you?  Which world?  These questions are to be answered in the “now”, as you understand it, through the realization that your power of action is in the present and not in the past.  Your only effective point of changing any aspect of your world lies in that miraculous instant connection of spirit and self through neurological impact.

To rid yourself of annoying restrictions then, my dear friend, you repattern your past from the present.  Whatever your circumstances, you use the past as a rich source, looking through it for your successes, restructuring it.  When you search it looking for what is wrong, then you become blind to what was right, in those terms, so that the past only mirrors the shortcomings that now face you.

Other events literally become invisible to you.  Since basically past and future exist at once, you are at the same time dangerously constructing your future along the same lines.

Individuals can go from psychologist to psychologist, from self-therapy to self-therapy, always with the same question: “What is wrong?”  The question itself becomes a format through which experience is seen, and itself represents one of the main reasons for all limitations, physical, psychic or spiritual.  (See the 624^th session in Chapter Five.)

At one point or another the individual ceased concentrating upon what was right in certain personal areas, and began to focus upon and magnify specific “lacks”.  With all good intentions, then, various solutions are looked for, but all based upon the premise that something is wrong.

If such a practice is continued, the concentration upon negatives can gradually bleed out into other previously unblemished areas of experience.

You are not at the mercy of past beliefs, therefore.  On the other hand, the sooner you begin to act upon new ones the better.  Otherwise you are not trusting them in the present.  If you are poor and want to have more money, and tray to maintain a belief in abundance – while still faced with the fact of present poverty – you must in your reality make some symbolic move that shows you are willing to accept change.

As foolish as it may sound, you should give some money away, or in whatever manner that suits you act as if you did have more money than you physically have.  You must respond to your new beliefs, so that neurologically the new message gets across.

You perform habitually in certain manners as a result of your beliefs.  Now if you willfully change some of those habits then you are also getting the message across.  The initiative must come from you, and in the present.  In a very real manner of speaking, this means changing your viewpoint, that particular perspective with which you view your past and present and imagine your future.

You must look within yourself for evidences of what you want in terms of positive experience.  Examine your past with that in mind.  Imagine your future from the power point of the present.  In such a way at least you are not using the past to reinforce your limitations, or projecting them into the future.  It is only natural to contrast what you want with what you have, and it is very easy to become discouraged in so doing, but looking for errors in the past will not help you.  A correctly utilized five-minute period of time can be of great benefit, however.  In this period concentrate upon the fact that the point of power is now.  Feel and dwell upon the certainty that your emotional, spiritual and psychic abilities are focused through the flesh, and for five minutes only direct all of your attention toward what you want.  Use visualization or verbal thought – whatever comes most naturally to you; but for that period do not concentrate upon any lacks, just upon your desire.

Use all of your energy and attention.  Then forget about it.  Do not check to see how well it is working.  Simply make sure that in that period your intentions are clear.  Then in one way or another, according to your own individual situation, make one physical gesture or act that is in line with your belief or desire.  Behave physically, then at least once a day in a way that shows that you have faith in what you are doing.  The act can be a very simple one.  If you are lonely and feel unwanted, it can merely involve your smiling at someone else.  If you are poor, it can involve such a simple thing as buying an item you want that costs two cents more than the one you would usually buy – acting on the faith, even that feebly, that the two cents will somehow be given you or come into your experience; but acting as if you had more than you do.

In health terms, it involves conducting yourself once a day as though you were not sick in whatever way given you.  But the belief in the present, reinforced for five minutes, plus such a physical action, will sometimes bring literally awesome results.

Such effects will occur however only if you cease looking into the past “for what is wrong”, and stop reinforcing your negative experience.  These same principles can be used in any area of your life, and in each you are choosing from a variety of probable events.

Those of you who believe in reincarnation in more or less conventional terms, can make the error of using or blaming “past” lives, organizing them through your current beliefs.  It is bad enough to believe that you are at the mercy of one past, but to consider yourself helpless before innumerable previous errors from other lives puts you in an impossible situation; the conscious will is robbed of its power to act.  Such lives exist simultaneously.  They are other expressions of yourself, interacting, but with each conscious self possessing the point of power in its own present.

It is for this reason that “past-life information” is so often used to reinforce current social situations – because, like the past in this life, such memories are constructed through present belief.

If such information is given to you by another, by a psychic, for example, that individual is also very apt to pick up those “lives” that make sense to you now, and – unconsciously of course – to structure them precisely along the lines of your beliefs.  This may not seem obvious.  If an individual believes that he is basically unworthy he will recall, or be given, those lives that justify that idea.  If he thinks he must pay for his sins now, then that belief will attract memory of those lives that will reinforce it; this will be highly organized recall, leaving out everything that does not apply.

If an individual believes that he is being taken advantage of, and is caught in a mundane existence, unappreciated, then he may receive from himself or others information showing that in other lives he was greatly honored – thereby reinforcing his belief that now he is taken for granted, or worse.

These statements of mine are general, for each individual will have his or her own way of reinforcing beliefs.  If you think you are ill, most likely past-life information will show that you committed crimes for which you are now doing penance.  In whatever framework you choose, you will always find proper reinforcement for your belief.

The truth as far as it can be stated is this: YOU FORM YOUR REALITY NOW, through the intersection of soul in flesh, and in your terms the present is your point of power.

Each of your reincarnational selves are born as a creature in flesh, like you.  Each one has its own “points of power”, or successive moments in which it also materializes daily existence in a linear manner from all the probabilities available to it.

In a way that will be explained in another book for those interested in such matters, there is a kind of coincidence with all of these present points of power that exists between you and your “reincarnational” selves.  There are even biological connections in terms of cellular “memory”.  (See the 653^rd session in Chapter Thirteen.)  So through your current beliefs you can, in your own space and time, attract tendencies toward certain experiences shared by these others.  There is a constant interaction in this multidimensional point of power, therefore, so that in your terms one incarnated self draws from all of the others what abilities it wants, according to its own specific, localized beliefs.

These selves are different counterparts of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism itself shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience.  This does not mean that at other levels you cannot perceive it, but that generally speaking events must seem to appear in a series.

In quite real personal and racial terms, the past is still happening.  You create it from your present according to your beliefs.  A removed appendix will not reappear physically.  There are certain frameworks that are accepted, built into your creaturehood.  There is far greater freedom, however, even on the cellular level.

Session 656

Personal Reality, Session 656

What you must understand is this: Each of the events in each of your lives was “once” probable.  From a given field of action, then, you choose those happenings that will be physically materialized.

This operates in individual and mass terms.  Suppose that today your home was robbed. Yesterday, the theft was one of innumerable probable events.  I chose such an example because more than one person would have to be involved – the victim and the robber.  Why was your home ransacked, and not your neighbor’s?  In one way or another, through your conscious thought you attracted such an event, and drew it from probability into actuality.  The occurrence would be an accumulation of energy – turned into action – and be brought about by corollary beliefs.

You may be convinced that human nature is evil, or that no one is safe from another’s aggression, or that people are motivated mainly by greed.  Such beliefs attract their own reality.  If you have anything worth losing, you are then automatically convinced that someone else will take it from you, or try their hardest to do so.  In your own way you send out messages to just such a person.  On basic levels your convictions will be quite similar, but one will see himself as the victim and one as the aggressor – that is, each of you will react differently to the same set of beliefs.  However the two of you are necessary if a crime of that nature is, or is to be, committed.

The beliefs of both of you find justification in physical life, and only reinforce themselves.  The fear of robbers attracts robbers.  If you think that men are evil, however, you are often not able to examine that as a belief, but take it as a condition of reality.

All of your present experience was drawn from probable reality.  During our life, any event must come through your creaturehood, with the built-in time recognition that is so largely a part of your neurological structure; so usually there is a lag, a lapse in time, during which your beliefs cause material actualization.  When you try to change your conviction in order to change your experience, you also have to first stop the momentum that you have already built up, so to speak.  You are changing the messages while the body is used to reacting smoothly, unquestioningly, to a certain set of beliefs.

There is a steady even flow in which conscious activity through the neurological structure brings about events, and a familiar pattern of reaction is established.  When you alter these conscious beliefs through effort, then a period of time is necessary while the structure learns to adjust to the new preferred situation.  If beliefs are changed overnight, comparatively less time is required.

In a manner of speaking, each belief can be seen as a powerful station, pulling to it from fields of probabilities only those signals to which it is attuned, and blocking out all others. When you set up a new station there may be some static or bleed-through from an old one for a while.

Any ability you have, then, can be “brought in more clearly”, amplified, and become practical rather than probable.  But is such a case you must concentrate upon the attribute – not, for example, upon the fact that you have not used it well thus far.

An artist produces a body of work in his lifetime.  Each painting is but one materialization, one focused presentation, of an endless variety of probable paintings.  The actual work involved in the selection of data is still made according to the beliefs in the artist’s conscious mind as to who he is, how good an artist he is, what kind of artist he is, what “school” of artistic beliefs he subscribes to, his ideas of society and his place in it, and esthetic and economic values, to name but a few.

The same sort of thing operates in the actualization of any event in which you are involved.  You create your life, then.  Inner images are of great importance to the artist.  He tries to project them upon his canvas or board.  Again, you are each your own artist, and your inner visualizations become models for other situations and events.  The artist utilizes training and mixes his colors in order to give artistic flesh to his paintings.  The images in your mind draw to themselves all the proper emotional energy and power needed to fill them out as physical events.

You can change the picture of your life at any time if only you realize that it is simply the one portrait of yourself that you have created from an unlimited amount of probable ones.  The peculiar aspect of your own probable portraits will still be characteristic of you, and no other.

The abilities, strengths and variants that you may want to actualize are already latent, in your terms, and at your disposal.  Suppose that you are unhealthy and desire health.  If you understand the nature of probabilities, you will not need to pretend to ignore the present situation.  You will recognize it instead as a probable reality that you have physically materialized.  Taking that for granted, you will then begin the process necessary to bring a different probability into physical experience.

You will do this by concentrating upon what you want, but feeling no conflict between that and what you have, because one will not contradict the other; each will be seen as a reflection of belief in daily life.  As it took some time to build up your present image with its unhealthy aspects, so it may take time to change that picture.  But concentration upon the present unhealthy situation will only prolong it.

Each condition is as real or unreal as the other.  Which you?  Which world?  You have your choice, broadly, within certain frameworks that you have chosen as a part of your creaturehood.  The past as you think of it, and the subconscious, again as you think of it, have little to do with your present experience outside of your beliefs about them.  The past contains for each of you some moments of joy, strength, creativity and splendor, as well as episodes of unhappiness, despair perhaps, turmoil and cruelty.  Your present convictions will act like a magnet, activating all such past issues, happy or sad.  You will choose from your previous experience all of those events that reinforce your conscious beliefs, and so ignore those that do not; the latter may even seem to be nonexistent.

As mentioned in the book (in Chapter Four, for instance), the emerging memories will then turn on the body mechanisms, merging past and present in some kind of harmonious picture.  This means that the pieces will fit together whether they are joyful or not.

This joining of the past and present, in that context, predisposes you to similar future events, for you have geared yourself for them.  Change now quite practically alters both the past and the future.  For you, because of your neurological organization, the present is obviously the only point from which past and future can be changed, or when action becomes effected.

I am not speaking symbolically.  In the most intimate of terms, our past and future are modified by your present reactions.  Alterations occur within the body.  Circuits within the nervous system are changed, and energies that you do not understand seek out new connection on much deeper levels far beyond consciousness.

Your present beliefs govern the actualization of events.  Creativity and experience are being formed moment by moment by each individual.

You must understand that your present is the point at which flesh and matter meet with the spirit.  Therefore the present is your point of power in your current lifetime, as you think of it.  If you assign greater force to the past, then you will feel ineffective and deny yourself your own energy.

For an exercise, sit with your eyes wide open, looking about you, and realize that this moment represents the point of your power, through which you can affect both past and future events.

The present seen before you, with its intimate physical experience, is the result of action in other such presents.  Do not be intimidated therefore by the past or the future.  There is no need at all for undesirable aspects of your contemporary reality to be projected into the future, unless you use the power of the present to do so.

If you learn to get hold of this feeling of power now, you can use it most effectively to alter your life situation in whatever way you choose – again, within those limitations set by your creaturehood.  If you were born without a limb, for example, your power in the present cannot automatically regenerate it in this life, although in other systems of reality you do possess that limb. (See Seth’s Preface, as well as the 615^th session in Chapter Two.)

Exterior conditions can always be changed if you understand the principles of which I am speaking.  Diseases can be eliminated, even those that seem fatal – but only if the beliefs behind them are erased or altered enough so that their specific focusing effect upon the body is sufficiently released.  The present as you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select your physical experience from all those events that could be materialized.  Your physical circumstances change automatically as your beliefs do.  As your knowledge grows, so your experience becomes more fulfilling.  This does not necessarily mean that it evens out in any way, or that there are not peaks and valleys.  Each aspiration presupposes the admission of a lack, each challenge presupposes a barrier to be overcome.  The more adventurous will often choose greater challenges, and so in their minds the contrasts between what they want to achieve and their present status can seem to be impossible.

In each case, however, the point of power is the present, and from that moment you choose which you, and which world.  The experience of a country is the cumulative result of the choice of each individual in it, so as you choose your circumstances you affect each other person within your country and your world.

In many “native” cultures an individual is not considered in terms of his age at all, and the numbering of years is regarded as insignificant.  In fact, a man may not know his age as you think of it.  It would do you all good – young, middle-aged and old alike – to forget the number of your years, because in your culture so many beliefs are limiting in those ways.  Youth is denied its wisdom and old age is denied its joy.

To pretend to ignore your age, to act young because you fear your age, is no answer.  (See the 644^th session in Chapter Eleven.)  In your terms your point of reality and power is, once more, in your current experience.  A realization of this would allow you at any age to draw upon qualities and knowledge that “existed” in your past or “will exist” in your future.  Your ages are probable [simultaneous].

Although time does not basically exist as you “know” it, you are neurologically forced to perceive your life as a series of passing moments.  As creatures you are born young and grow older.  Yet the animals, as creatures, are not as limited in their experience in that regard.  They have no beliefs in old age that automatically shut down their abilities; so left alone, while the do physically die as all creatures must in those terms, they do not deteriorate in the same way.

You do not understand the communications between your selves and pets, for example, where in their own way they interpret and react to your beliefs.  They mirror your ideas, then, and so become vulnerable as they would not be in their natural circumstances.  In greater terms their relationship with you is natural, of course, but their innate realization that the creature’s point of power is in the present is to some degree undermined by their own receptivity and translation of your beliefs.  A young kitten is treated differently than an older one.  The cat responds to such conditioning,  In the same way your own conclusions about age become fact in your experience.  In line with them, if you could convince yourself that you were ten years younger, or ten years older, then it would be faithfully reflected in your personal environment.

If you were twenty, you would be able to draw upon the wisdom you imagine you would have at thirty.

If you were sixty, you would be able to use the physical strength you imagined was denied you now, but available then.  All of this would be physically and biologically expressed within your body as well.

Which you?  Which world?  If you are lonely it is because you believe in your loneliness in this present point that you acknowledge as time.  From what seems to be the past you draw only those memories that reinforce your condition, and you project those into the future.  Physically, you are overwhelming your body as it responds to a state of loneliness through chemical and hormonal reactions.  You are also denying your own point of action within the present.

Vitamins, better food, medical attention, may temporarily rejuvenate the body, but unless you change your beliefs it will quickly become swamped again by your feelings of depression.  In such a case you must realize that you make your own loneliness, and resolve to change through both thought and action.  Action is thought in physical motion, outwardly perceived.

Session 655

Personal Reality, Session 655

Your neuronal activity structures your conscious experience, then.  The overall rhythms of your creaturehood automatically bring you into periods of rest and intense focus.

The night and day constitute a framework within which your experience is couched, providing the conscious mind with needed stimuli and relaxation, and allowing for proper assimilation of events.  As mentioned (in sessions 651-652 in Chapter Thirteen), even then the body construction has built-in mechanisms to alter such an arrangement when further data can be handled.

As a rule you have enough difficulty dealing with the day’s occurrences, much less next week’s, and so in the sequence of events the reality of probable actions is usually hidden from view.  This more complex reality is an ever-existing property of your personal creaturehood.  Beside this, in your terms you exist as a creature more than once.  In each of your “reincarnational” existences you are faced with the same relationship with probabilities.  In each case, also, the nature of the conscious mind sets up its own territory-of-identity that it regards as its own.  This provides a clear focus in which “present” action can be considered.  These incarnations are all simultaneous.

A death is but one night to the soul.  The vaster entity of which you are part follows your progress as easily as you follow your own through the days.  As a rule most of you wake up in the same bed in the same house or town, but certainly you wake up as the same person in the same century.  In those terms the entity wakes up as a different person each day, in a different century, each life seeming like a day in its level of experience.  It carries the memory and simultaneous experience of each of those selves.

A form is basically nonphysical.  What you see of form is only that part that can be effectively active or materialized within your system of reality.  So the entity in its own way possesses what you can think of as future neuronal structures.

Within that vast form is your own, which is briefer, yet is not lost, not limited and not predetermined.  You form your corner of the universe, which is itself a part of another one.  Within this the actions and beliefs of one affect all.

Each part is vital, and in one way or another there is instant communication between the smallest and the largest, the cobweb and the spider, the man, the entity, and the star – and each spins its own web of probabilities from which other universes continually spring.

All of this may seem to have little to do with your daily personal experience, and yet it is intimately connected, for personally and en masse you can indeed create “the best” of all possible worlds.

The performance of great athletes gives evidence of abilities inherent in the human form that are little used.  Great artists by their very works demonstrate other attributes latent in the race as a whole.  They still represent one-line delineations, however.  Within the experience of your race as you know it lie all the patterns that would point to some fully developed human being, in which all inherent tendencies were given full play and came to fruition.

You would have an individual who displayed within himself [or herself] all of those great abilities known to the race, fulfilled according to his own unique temper – the artist, mathematician, athlete, the inventor – all the extraordinary qualities of creaturedom; the emotional realities would be used to their capacity, and any of the racial qualities or characteristics of the species would be given their complete freedom.

Wisdom and foolishness would be seen as aspects, one of the other.  Religion and science would each be unhampered by dogma in such an individual.  In the same way, following your own “trace” experiences and characteristics, you can discover those “probable” abilities that are yours, and uncover to some degree the nature of probable actions open to you for physical materialization.

There are traces in your present experience of your probable selves, even as there are signs in each individual of all the great talents shown and developed so flamboyantly by a few.  These traces can be brought into your experience to enrich it.  They do so in any case on unconscious levels, where they form the basis from which you choose your current experience.

The next brief chapter will be devoted to methods that will allow you to take advantage of greater options, to bring into your daily experience events and experiences that have so far remained “latent”.  In each individual case the options will be different, of course, yet you can draw into your present life some knowledge and intimate connection with your own probable realities.

On a conscious basis, then, you can learn to deepen the dimensions of your life by pulling into it the rich fabric of probabilities.

Chapter 15: Which You? Which World? Only You Can Answer. How To Free Yourself From Limitations

Since your conscious beliefs determine those unconscious functions that bring about your personal experience, your first step is to enlarge those beliefs.

The concepts given in this book should have already helped you do that to some extent.  Within your own subjective reality are traces of all those roads not taken, those abilities not used.  You may think of yourself as primarily a parent, or mainly in terms of your job or profession.  As much as possible, for now, forget the normal familiar light in which you see yourself, and consider your identity.

Write down or enumerate all of your known physical and mental abilities, whether they have been developed or not, and all of those inclinations toward particular activities – even those only remotely considered – as well as those that have come at all vividly to mind.

These represent the varied probable characteristics from which you have chosen to activate your particular main interest.  Out of these attributes, therefore, you chose what you now consider to be your hard-bed reality.

Any of those directions, followed, can enrich the existence that you know, and in turn open up other probabilities that now escape you.  The main image of yourself that you have held has, to a large extent, also closed your mind to these other probable interests and identifications.  If you think in terms of a multidimensional self, then you will realize that you have many more avenues open to expression and fulfillment than you have been using.  These probable achievements will lie latent unless you consciously decide to bring them into being.

Whatever talents you sense you have can be developed only if you determine to do so.  The simple act of decision will then activate the unconscious mechanisms.  You, as a personality, regardless of your health, wealth or circumstances, have a rich variety of probable experience from which to choose.  Consciously you must realize this and seize the direction for your own life.  Even if you say, “I will go along with all life offers”, you are making a conscious decision.  If you say, “I am powerless to direct my life”, you are also making a deliberate choice – and in that case a limiting one.

The path of experience is nowhere settled.  There is no one road that does not have avenues to another.  There are deep veins of probable actions ever available to you at any given time.  Your imagination can be of great value, allowing you to open yourself to such courses; you can then use it to help you bring these into being.

If you are poor, you chose that reality from many probable ones that did not involve poverty – and that are still open.  If you chose illness, again there is a probable reality ready for initiation in which you choose health.  If you are lonely there are probable friends you refused to meet in the past, but who are readily available.

In your mind, therefore, see those probable abilities or events taking place.  As you do, the intensity of your desire brings them into your experience.  There are no boundaries, again, set about the self.  There are literally many other probable you’s.  You can draw upon their abilities, as in their own way they call upon your own, for you are all intimately connected.

You must realize that you are indeed a probable you.  Your experience is the result of beliefs.  Your neuronal structure necessitates a certain focus so that other experiences counter to your conscious assumptions remain probable or latent.  Alter the beliefs and any probable self can, within certain limitations, be actualized.

Session 654

Personal Reality Session 654

In your terms, practically speaking, probable events seem to make more sense when you think of them as latent future ones.

The fact remains that there are probable past events that “can still happen” within your personal previous experience.  A new event can literally be born in the past – “now”.

On a grand scale this rarely occurs in such a way that you perceive it.

A new belief in the present, however, can cause changes in the past on a neuronal level.  You must understand that basically time is simultaneous.  Present beliefs can indeed alter the past.  In some cases of healing, in the spontaneous disappearance of cancer, for instance, or of any other disease, certain alterations are made that affect cellular memory, genetic codes, or neuronal patterns in the past.

A sudden or intense belief in health can indeed “reverse” a disease, but in a very practical way it is a reversal in terms of time.  New memories are inserted in place of the old ones, as far as cells are concerned under such conditions.  This kind of therapy happens quite frequently on a spontaneous basis when people rid themselves of diseases they do not even know they possess.

Learning is not simply passed on from living tissue to living tissue – this your biologists have discovered – but it is also passed on through the body’s present corporeal reality, sometimes entirely changing the messages to past cells, that in your terms no longer exist.

In somewhat the same way, a strong belief in a particular ability generated in the present will reach into the past and effect whatever changes would have had to occur there in order to now make the ability apparent.

This is the reason for the results of some experiments being conducted abroad, in which accelerated learning takes place, when under hypnosis or otherwise a present individual is convinced that he or she is, for example, a great painter, or a linguist.  The present belief activates “latent” abilities within each person.

The biological structure as it existed in the past is therefore affected.  Experience is built into the organism that it did not have before, in your terms.  It is a sort of reprogramming.  It is impossible, of course, for you to examine cellular structure now as it exists in the present and simultaneously as it existed in the past.  Scientifically you can only probe those effects that appear within your present.  When you alter your beliefs today you also reprogram your past.  As far as you are concerned the present is your point of action, focus, and power, and from that point of volition you form both your future and past.  Realizing this, you will understand that you are not at the mercy of a past over which you have no control.

While your present conscious beliefs dictate your current experience, and while your physical body wears its solidity only in present time to your senses, beneath this both the ever-changing elements of your body and your consciousness are relatively free in time.  They exist in a multidimensionality with which rational consciousness is not yet equipped to deal.

This is not meant to dilute the function or natural abilities of reasoning awareness, for its powers allow you to focus experience in a highly specific manner, and to direct energy with great purposeful attention.  In your terms, this action is in the process of automatically changing the nature of rational consciousness – which is, as you think of it, in a state of evolution.

Your consciousness is not a thing that you possess.  Your individuality is not a thing with limits.  If you ask, “What is my individuality in all of this?” or, “Which ‘I’ am I?” then you are automatically thinking of yourself as a psychological entity with definite boundaries that must be protected at all costs.  You may say, “I was born in a house on a certain street in a certain town, and no present belief to the contrary will change that fact”.  If, in the present, one past event can be altered within your neuronal structure, however, then basically no event is safe from such change.

In your practical experience, tables remain tables, although physicists well know that physical appearance is in some ways a mirage.  At your level of experience many effects are accepted and used quite practically, as are your solid tables.  You do not perceive the atoms or molecules that compose them; so in the same way, but in a different manner of speaking, events seem “solid” as tables do.

Yet at other levels this seeming solidity of events also breaks down.  Which you?  Which world?  A sudden contemporary belief in illness will actually reach back into the past, affecting the organism at that level, and inserting into the past experience of the cells the initiation of those biological events that will then seem to give birth to a resent disease.

In the current pivoting of its experience, therefore, your conscious mind directs not only the present, but future and past experience of deep neurological events.

Cellular memory can be changed at any point.  Present beliefs can insert into the past new memory, both psychologically and physically.  The future is in no way predetermined on basic levels.  This does not mean that the future cannot be predicted sometimes, for in practical terms you will often continue with certain lines of probability which can be seen “ahead of time”.

Such predictions can affect the probabilities, of course, and reinforce a present line of belief.  Physicians often wonder whether they should tell terminal patients of their impending deaths.  There is great controversy.  In some cases such a prediction can make death a fact – while its opposite can regenerate the patient’s belief in his or her own ability to live.

No man will die simply because a physician tells him he is going to, however.  No one is so at the mercy of another’s beliefs.  Each individual, generally speaking, knows his challenges and overall programs, and the time of his death.  But even such decisions can be altered at any time in your “now” – the entire body can be regenerated in a way that would be impossible to predict in usual medical terms (See the 624^th session in Chapter Five.)

You rule your experiences from the focal point of your present, where your beliefs directly intercept with the body and the physical world on the one hand, and the invisible world from which your draw your energy and strength on the other.  This applies to individuals, societies, races and nations, and to sociological, biological and psychic activities.

In daily practical experience, try to concentrate for a while upon seemingly subordinate abilities, ones that you think of as latent.  If you do so consistently, using your imagination and will, then those abilities will become prominent in your present.  It is not simply that past, forgotten, unconsciously perceived events will be put together in a new way and organized under a new heading, but that in that past (now not perceivable), the entire bodily response to seemingly past events will change.

Your desire or belief will literally be reaching back into time, teaching the nerves new tricks.  Definite reorganizations in that past will occur in your present, allowing you to behave in entirely new fashions.

Learned behavior therefore alters not only present and future but also past conduct.  Your power as a rational consciousness focused in the present provides you with opportunities for creativity that you are but vaguely learning to understand.  As you do learn, you will automatically begin to appreciate the multidimensional nature of not only your own species but of others as well.  The moment as you think of it, then, is the creative framework through which you, the nonphysical self, constantly form corporeal reality; and through that window into earthly existence you form both its future and its past.

In purely physical terms, what you think of as consciousness of the self arises from a certain peak of intensity reached by the gestalt consciousness of the atoms and molecules, and cells and organs, that compose the body.

The peculiarly physically oriented self that you know has its reality in that context, but even in physical terms its reality is more than any analysis of its entirety would show.  It then directs the activity of the body, and is to that extent dependent upon neurological activity.

The psychic structure of consciousness that organizes that bodily gestalt is, however, not dependent upon it, and so the you that you experience is only a portion of this greater identity.

During certain stages in sleep states you short-circuit the neurological structures, and perceive experiences of a multidimensional nature that you then attempt to translate, as best you can, into stimuli that can be physically assimilated – hence you often convert these into symbolic images that can be understood, and to some extent reacted to, by your bodily structure.

Many times such constructions are used as linear visual patterns, for example.  Visually they often bear similarity to the inner architecture of the cells, and to planets.  Your dream images are biologically structured, then.  The experiences behind them bring you in contact with the deepest portions of your nonphysical reality, and it is the unconscious who translates these for you into recognizable images and forms.

In the same way your unconscious also transforms for you, from an otherwise undifferentiated maze of reality, fields of activation into recognizable objects and events in your daily life.

You are now rooted in your creaturehood, graced to perceive through your body a unique living experience.  So when I mention techniques that will allow you to perceive other fields of reality beside your own, I want you to realize that these should be used to enhance your enjoyment of that creaturehood, and to enrich your sensual as well as spiritual expression.

In the brilliance of your physical being, both are entwined.

Session 652

Personal Reality, Session 652

Such a change in your waking and sleeping patterns very nicely helps cut through your habitual ways of looking at the nature of your own personal world, and so alters your conception of reality in general.

To some extent, there is a natural and spontaneous merging of what you would think of as conscious and unconscious activity.  This in itself brings about a greater understanding of the give-and-take that exists between the ego and other portions of the self.  The unconscious is no longer equated with darkness, or with unknown frightening elements.  Its character is transformed, so that the “dark” qualities are seen as actually illuminating portions of conscious life, while also providing great sources of power and energy for normal ego-oriented experience.

On the other hand, areas of ordinary behavior that may have seemed opaque before, cloudy or dark – personal characteristic behavior that was not understood, for instance – may suddenly become quite clear as a result of this transformation, in which the shadowy aspects of the unconscious are perceived as brilliant.

Barriers are broken down, and with them certain beliefs that were based upon them.  If the unconscious is no longer feared, then the races that symbolized it are no longer to be feared either.

There are many other natural and spontaneous kinds of comprehension that can also result from the waking and sleeping rhythms that I have suggested.  The unconscious, the color black, and death all have strongly negative connotations in which the inner self is feared; the dream state is mistrusted and often suggests thoughts of both death and/or evil.  But changed wake-sleep habits can, again, bring about a transformation in which it is obvious that dreams contain great wisdom and creativity, that the unconscious is indeed quite conscious, and that in fact the individual sense of identity can be retained in the dream state.  The fear of self-annihilation, symbolically thought of as death, can then no longer apply as it did before.

As a result, other individually built-up beliefs that depend upon the existence of such opposites also spontaneously break down.

When you find yourself as alert, responsive, and intellectual in the dream state as you are in waking life, it becomes impossible to operate within the old framework.  This does not mean that in all dreams that particular kind of awareness is achieved, but it is often accomplished within the suggested wake-sleep pattern.

A certain beneficial and natural situation is arrived at, in which the conscious and unconscious minds meet.  This occurs spontaneously whatever your sleep patterns, but is very brief and seldom remembered.  The optimum state is so short because of the prolonged drugging of the conscious mind.

Animals follow their own natural waking-sleeping schedules, and in their way derive far greater benefits from both states than you, and use them with greater effectiveness – particularly along the lines of the body’s built-in system of therapy.  They know exactly when to alter their patterns to longer or shorter sleep periods, therefore adjusting the adrenaline output and regulating all of the bodily hormones.

In humans, the idea of nutrition is also involved.  With your habits the body is literally starved for long periods at night, then often overfed during the day.  Important therapeutic information that is given in dreams, and meant to be recalled, is not remembered because your sleep habits plunge you into what you think of as unconsciousness far too long.

The body itself can be physically refreshed and rested in much less than eight hours, and after five hours the muscles themselves yearn for activity.  This need is also a signal to awaken so that unconscious material and dream information can be consciously assimilated.

Many of your misconceptions about the nature of reality are directly related to the division you place between your sleeping and waking experience, your conscious and unconscious activity.  Opposites seem to occur that do not exist in actuality.  Myths, symbols and rationalizations all become necessary to explain the seeming divergences, the seeming contradictions between realities that appear to be so different.

Individual psychological mechanisms are activated, sometimes, in terms of neurosis or other mental problems; these bring out into the open inner challenges or dilemmas that otherwise would be worked out more easily through an open give-and-take of conscious and unconscious reality.

In the natural body-mind relationship the sleep state operates as a great connector, an interpreter, allowing the free flow of conscious and unconscious material.  In the kind of sleep patterns suggested, optimum conditions are set up.  Neurosis and psychosis simply would not occur under such conditions.  And in the natural back-and-forth leeway of the system, exterior dilemmas or problems are worked out in the dream situation, and interior difficulty may also be solved symbolically through physical experience.

Illumination concerning the inner self may appear clearly during waking reality, and in the same way invaluable information about the conscious self may be received in the dream state.  There is a spontaneous flow of psychic energy with appropriate hormonal reaction in both situations.  You do not have energy dammed up through repressions, for example, and emotions and their expressions are not feared.

In your present system of beliefs, and with the dubious light in which the unconscious is considered, a fear of the emotions is often generated.  Not only are they often hindered in waking life, then, but censored as much as possible in dreams.  Their expression becomes very difficult; great blockages of energy occur, which in your terms can result in neurotic or even stronger, psychotic, behavior.

The inhibition of such emotions also interferes with the nervous system and its therapeutic devices.  These repressed emotions, and the whole charge behind such distorted concepts about the unconscious, result in a projection outward upon others.  In your individual area there will be persons upon whom you will project all of those charged, frightening emotions or characteristics.  At the same time you will be drawn to those individuals because the projections represent a part of you.

On a national basis the characteristics or qualities will be projected outward onto an enemy.  Within a nation they can be directed against those of a particular race, creed or color.

You did not simply come upon your sleep patterns.  They are not the result of your technology or industrial habits.  Instead they are a part of those beliefs that caused you to develop your technological, industrial society.  They emerged as you began to categorize experience more and more, to see yourselves as separate from the spring our fountainhead of your own psychological reality.  In natural circumstances the animals, while sleeping at night, are still partly alert against predators and danger.  There is within the innate characteristics of the mammalian brain, then, a great balance in which complete physical relaxation can occur in sleep, while consciousness is maintained in a “partially suspended, passive-yet-alert” manner.  That state allows conscious participation and interpretation of “unconscious” dream activity.  The condition gives the body its refreshment, yet it does not lie inert for such long periods of time.

Mammals have also changed their habits to accommodate those conditions you have thrust upon them, so the behavior studied in laboratories is not necessarily that shown by the same animals in their natural state.

Taken alone, this statement can appear deceptive.  The alterations in behavior are themselves natural, of course.

Animal consciousness is different than your own.  With yours, a finer discrimination is necessary so that unconscious material can be assimilated.  All of mankind’s developments however are latent in the animal brain, and many attributes of which you are unaware are latent in your own.  The biological pathways for them already exist.

In your current beliefs, again, consciousness is equated in very limited terms with your conception of intellectual behavior: you consider this to be a peak of mental achievement, growing from the “undifferentiated” perceptions of childhood, and returning ignominiously to them again in old age.  Such wake-sleep patterns as I have suggested would acquaint you with the great creative and energetic portions of psychological behavior – that are not undifferentiated at all, but simply distinct from your usual concepts of consciousness; and these operate throughout your life.

The natural experiences of what you think of as time distortion, for example, occurring in childhood and old age alike, represent quite normal experiences of your basic “time environment” – much more so than the clock time with which you are so familiar.

The patterns I have suggested, therefore, will bring you far closer to an understanding of the reality of your being, and help you break down beliefs that cause personal and social division.

The long period of continuous waking conscious activity is to some extent at variance with your natural inclinations.

It cuts you off from the spontaneous give-and-take of conscious and unconscious material mentioned earlier (in this session), and of itself you see necessitates certain changes that can make your prolonged sleep period necessary.  The body is denied the frequent rests it requires.  Conscious stimuli is over-applied, making assimilation difficult and placing a strain upon the mind-body relationship.

The division between the two aspects of experience begins to take on the characteristics of completely diverse behavior.  The unconscious becomes more and more unfamiliar to consciousness.  Those beliefs build up about it, and the symbolisms involved are exaggerated.  The unknown seems to be threatening and degenerate.  The color black assumes stronger tendencies in its connection with evil – something to be avoided.  Self-annihilations seems to be a threat ever-present in the dream or sleep state.  At the same time all of those flamboyant, creative, spontaneous, emotional surges that emerge normally from the unconscious become feared and projected outward, then, upon enemies, other races and creeds.

Sexual behavior obviously will be considered depraved by those most afraid of their own sensual natures.  They will ascribe it to primitive or evil or unconscious sources, and even attempt to censor their dreams in that regard.  They will then project the greatest sexual license upon those groups they choose to represent their own repressed behavior.  If sex is equated with evil, the other group will of course be considered evil.

If the members of such a rigid group believe that youth is innocent, then they will deny sexual experience as having any place in childhood, and alter their own memories to fit their beliefs.

If a young adult believes that sex is good but old age is bad, then he or she will find it impossible to consider exuberant sexuality as a portion of an older person’s experience.  In the dream state the child and the old man or woman can exist simultaneously, and the individual is made quite aware of the full range of creaturehood.

The wisdom of the child and of the aged are both available.  Lessons from “future experience” are also at hand.  There are quite natural physical mechanisms in the body that provide for such interaction.  You deny yourself many of these advantages however through the artificial alienation that you have set up by your present wake-sleep patterns, to which, again, your ideas of good and evil are intimately connected.

Those of you who cannot practically make any alterations in sleeping habits can still obtain some benefits by changing your beliefs in the areas discussed, learning to recall your dreams and resting briefly when you can, and immediately afterward recording those impressions that you retain.

You must give up any ideas that you have as to the unsavory nature of unconscious activity.  You must learn to believe in the goodness of your being.  Otherwise you will not explore these other states of your own reality.

When you trust yourself then you will trust your own dream interpretations – and these will lead you to greater self-understanding.  Your beliefs of good and evil will become much more clear to you, and you will no longer need to project repressed tendencies out upon others in exaggerated fashion.