Session 700

Unknown Reality, Session 700

You must first of all understand that your own greater reality exists whether you are in flesh our out of it, and that your subjective experience has a far greater scope than the physical brain itself allows.

This – apart from corporal living – continues of course while you are a creature in space and time.  It presents a parallel noncorporeal existence, so to speak, that your brain does not register.  In the sleep state you are in a connective area, where bleed-throughs occur.

The blueprints for reality will not be found in the exterior universe.  Some other civilizations experimented with a different kind of science than the one with which you are familiar.  They met with varying degrees of success in their attempts to understand the nature of reality, and it is true that their overall goals were different than yours.  Such people were focusing their consciousness in a completely different direction.  Your own behavior, customs, sciences, arts, and disciplines are in a way uniquely yours, yet they also provide glimpses into the ways in which various groupings of abilities can be used to probe into the “unknown” reality.

Art is as much a science, in the truest sense of the world, as biology is.  Science as you think of it separates itself from the subject at hand.  Art identifies with the subject.  In your terms, then, other civilizations considered art as a fine science, and used it in such a way that it painted a very clear-cut picture of the nature of reality – a picture in which human emotion and motivation played a grand role.

Your scientists spend many long years in training.  If the same amount of time were spent to learn a different kind of science, you could indeed discover far more about the known and unknown realities.  There are some individuals embarked upon a study of dreams, working in the “dream laboratories”; but here again there is prejudiced perception, with scientists on the outside studying the dreams of others, or emphasizing the physical changes that occur in the dream state.  The trouble is that many in the sciences do not comprehend that there is an inner reality.  It is not only as valid as the exterior one, but it is the origin for it.  It is that world that offers you answers, solutions, and would reveal many of the blueprints that exist behind the world of your experience.

The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world.  Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness – one that is equally at home in either existence, well-grounded and secure in each.  Almost anyone can become a satisfied and productive amateur in this art-science; but its true fulfillment takes years of training, a strong sense of purpose, and dedication – as does any true vocation.

To some extent, a natural talent is a prerequisite for such a true dream-art scientist.  A sense of daring, exploration, independence, and spontaneity is required.  Such a work is a joy.  There are some such people who are quite unrecognized by your scientists, because the particular gifts involved are given zero priority.  But the talent still exists.

A practitioner of this ancient art learns first of all how to become conscious in normal terms, while in the sleep state.  Then he becomes sensitive to the different subjective alterations that occur when dreams begin, happen, and end.  He familiarizes himself with the symbolism of his own dreams, and sees how these do or do not correlate with the exterior symbols that appear in the waking life that he shares with others.  I will have more to say about these shared symbols later, for they can become agreed upon signposts.

There are inner meeting places, then, interior “places” that serve as points of inner commerce and communication.  In a completely different context, they are quite as used as any city or marketplace in the physical world.  This will be elaborated upon later in the book.  Our dream-art scientist learns to recognize such point of correlation.

In a manner of speaking, they are indeed learning centers.  Many people have dreams in which they are attending classes, for example, in another kind of reality.  Whether or not such dreams are “distorted”, many of them represent a valid inner experience.  All of this, however, is but a beginning for our dream-art scientist, for he or she then begins to recognize the fact of involvement with many different levels and kinds of reality and activity.  He must learn to isolate these, separate one from the other, and then try to understand the laws that govern them.  As he does so, he learns that some of these realities nearly coincide with the physical one, that on certain levels events become physical in the future, for example, while others do not.  He is then beginning to glimpse the blueprints for the world that you know.

You manufacture articles.  It has taken you centuries to reach your point of technological achievement.  It seems to you then that objects come from the outside, generally speaking – for after all, do you not make them in your factories and laboratories?

In a way it seems that “artificial” or synthetic fabrics are not natural.  You produce them from the outside.  Yet your world is composed of quite natural products, objects that emerge, almost miraculously when you think of it, from the inside of the earth.

You work with material that is already there, provided.  You mix, change, and rearrange what is already given.  The entire physical universe emerges from an inside, however, and none of your manufacture would provide you with even one object, were it not for those that appeared as source materials long before.  Wood, plants, all the species of earth, the seasons and the planet itself, come from this unidentifiable inside.  Physical events have the same source.

The true scientist understands that he must probe the interior and not the exterior universe; he will comprehend that he cannot isolate himself from a reality of which he is necessarily a part, and that to do so presents at best a distorted picture.  In quite true terms, your dreams and the trees outside of your windows have a common denominator: they both spring from the withinness of consciousness.

Simply as an analogy, look at it this way.  Your present universe is a mass-shared dream, quite valid – a dream that presents reality in a certain light; a dream that is above all meaningful, creative, based not upon chaos, but upon spontaneous order.  To understand it, however, you must go to another level of consciousness – one where, perhaps, the dream momentarily does not seem so real.  There, from another viewpoint, you can see it even more clearly, holding it like a photograph in your hands; at the same time, you can see from that broader perspective that you do indeed also stand outside of the dream context, but in a “within” that cannot show in the snapshot because of its limitations.