Session 689

Unknown Reality, Session 689

To some extent the development of consciousness as you understand it follows the development of the gods through the ages; and in those stories appear the guises that man might have taken, as well as those that he did.

All animal gods hint of various experiments and species in which consciousness took different forms, in which the birth of egotistical awareness as you know it tried several areas of exploration.  There were, for example, different versions of man-animal comprehension and activity.

From approximately 50 million to 30 million years ago there were innumerable species that would now seem to you to be mutated forms.  The distinction between man-animal and animal-man was not as clear as it is in your time.  In some ways consciousness was more mobile, less centered, and more experimental.  That early rapport, that early mixture, would later be remembered in myths of gods in animal form.  Such a variety existed long before your paleontologists realize that it did.  There were many toolmaking animal species, some predating man’s toolmaking facility.  Consciousness knows all of the probabilities of fulfillment open to it.  Each species carries in its individual and mass psyche the blueprints of such probable actualities.  These blueprints are biologically valid – that is, they allow the cells precognitive knowledge, upon which present behavior is based.  This applies not only individually, so that the cell knows its future pattern, for example; but in the same way, an entire species will unconsciously have the knowledge of its own “ideal” fulfillment in its overall world environment.

As specified, ego consciousness grew.  These inner patterns, native to the psyche of any species, turned into concepts, mental images – intuitive projections that were all meant to give conscious direction.  The gods served, then, as stimulators of development.  Seemingly outside of the self, they were meant to lead the self into its greatest area of fulfillment.  The god images would change as consciousness did.  The various god concepts that have fallen by the wayside, so to speak, represent areas of development that were not chosen, in your terms, but they are still latent.  The totem pole, for example, is a remnant from an era where there was much greater communication between man and the animals – when, in fact, men went to the animals to learn, and from them first acquired knowledge of herbs and corrective medicinal behavior.

Historically, it seems to you that mankind was born from an animal’s undifferentiated kind of consciousness into egotistical self-awareness.  Instead, many types of consciousness existed in the period of which I am speaking.  The animals chose to develop their own kind of consciousness, as you chose your own.  Animal awareness may seem undifferentiated to you.  It is however highly specific, poised in the moment, but so completely that in your terms past and future are largely meaningless.

The specific concentration, however, results in an exquisite focus.  Ego consciousness lost part of that focus in comparison.  The totem poles date back to the time when men and animals understood each other, before that point of departure.  Physical species that existed and flourished in those epochs then became probable to you, for the did not develop in your system but became extinct.  Their living relics existed in the god concepts that embodied them.

In one way or another all mythology contains descriptions of other species existing on the earth in various forms.  This includes stories of fairies and giants, for example.  Mythology tells you about the archaeology of your race psychically as well as physically.  There were, then, smaller and larger species of men, with varying conscious connections with the rest of nature.  The larger experiments involved the production of a species that would be a part of the earth, and yet become aware co-creators of it.  There were innumerable considerations, innumerable experiments, with size, brain capacity, neurological structure, and with a kind of consciousness flexible enough to change with its environment, and also vigorous enough to explore and alter that environment.

The emerging consciousness had to have, latently at least, the capacity to become aware of world conditions.  When man knew no more than a simple tribal life, his brain already had the capacity to learn anything it must, for one day it would be responsible for the life of a planet.

Such leeway left room for many probabilities and for many “errors”, but the developing consciousness had to be free to make its own judgments.  It would not be programmed any more than necessary by “instinct”.  It was, however, biologically locked into earthly existence, and so meant to understand its natural heritage.  It could not separate itself too much, then, or become overly arrogant.  Its survival was so linked to the rest of nature that it would of necessity always have to return to that base.  It responds to an inborn impetus for its own greatest fulfillment, and will automatically change directions in answer to its own experiments and experience.  There are great sweeping changes in religious concepts abroad in your times, and these represent man’s innate knowledge.  His consciousness – his psyche – is projecting greater images of his own probable fulfillment, and these are seen in his changing concepts of God.