Session 718

Unknown Reality, Session 718

This section of “Unknown Reality deals with the various exercises that will, I hope, provide you with your own intimate glimpses into previously unknown realities.

I said that your normal focus of consciousness can be compared to your home station.  So far, exercises have been described that will greatly lead you away from concentration upon this home base, even while its structure is strengthened at the same time.  You can also call this home station or local program your world view, since from it you perceive your reality.  To some extent it represents your personal focus, through which you interpret most of your experience.  As I mentioned, when you begin to move away from that particular organization, strange things may start to happen.  You may be filled with wonder, excitement, or perplexity.  You may be delighted or appalled, according to whether or not your new perceptions agree or disagree with your established world view.

Instead of a regular session (last Monday night), the framework of the session was used in a new kind of exercise.  It was meant as an example of what can happen under the best of circumstances, when someone leaves a native world view and tunes in to another, quite different from the original.

You always form your own experience.  Ruburt picked up on the world view of a man known dead.  He was not directly in communication with William James.

He was aware, however, of the universe through William James’s world view.  As you might dial a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned in to the view of reality now held in the mind of William James.  Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact – but only with the validity of the emotions.  Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that “living picture” exists despite time or space.  It can be perceived by others.

Each world view exists at its own particular “frequency”, and can only be tuned in to by those who are more or less within the same range.  However, the frequencies themselves have to be adjusted properly to be brought into focus, and those adjustments necessitate certain intents and sympathies.  It is not possible to move in to such a world view if you are basically at odds with it, for example.  You simply will not be able to make the proper adjustments.

Ruburt has been working with alterations of consciousness and wondering about the basic validity of religion.  He has been trying to reconcile intellectual and emotional knowledge.  James is far from one of his favorite writers, yet Ruburt’s interests, intent, and desire were close enough so that under certain conditions he could experience the world view held by James.  The unknown reality is unknown only because you believe it must be hidden.  Once that belief is annihilated, the other quite-as-legitimate views of reality can appear to your consciousness, and worlds just as valid as your own swim into view.

To do this, you must have faith in yourself, and in the framework of your known reality.  Otherwise you will be too afraid to abandon even briefly the habitual, organized view of the world that is your own.

Even in your life as you understand it, if you are insecure or frightened, you cannot properly see your family or your neighbors.  If you are afraid, then your own fear stands between yourself and others.  You do not dare take your eyes off yourself for a second.  You cannot afford to be friendly, for instance, because you are terrified of being rebuffed.

In the same way, if you are overly concerned about the nature of your own reality, and if you are looking to others to justify your existence, you will not be able to abandon your own world view successfully, for you will feel too threatened.  Or, traveling in psychic exercises even slightly away from your own home station, you will try to take your familiar paraphernalia with you, and interpret even entirely new situations of consciousness in the light of your own world view.  You will transpose your own set of assumptions, then, into conditions in which they may not really fit at all.

Ruburt picked up on William James’s world view because their interests coincided.  A letter from a Jungian psychologist helped serve as a stimulus.  The psychologist asked me to comment about Jung.  Ruburt felt little correspondence with Jung.  In the back of his mind he wondered about James, mainly because he knew that Joseph (Rob) enjoyed one of James’s books.

It is quite possible to tune in to the world view of any person, living or dead in your terms.  The world view of any individual, even not yet born from your standpoint, exists nevertheless.  Ruburt’s experience simply serves as an example of what is possible.

Quite rightly, he did not interpret the event in conventional terms, and Joseph did not suppose that James himself was communicating in the way usually imagined.  Joseph did recognize the excellence of the material.  James was not aware of the situation.  For that matter, James himself was embarked upon other adventures.  Ruburt picked up on James’s world view, however, as in your terms at least it “existed” perhaps 10 years ago.  Then, in his mind, James playfully thought of a book the he would write were he “living”, called The Varieties of Religions States – an altered version of a book he wrote in life.

He felt that the soul chooses states of emotion as you would choose, say, a state to live in.  He felt that the chosen emotional state was then used as a framework through which to view experience.  He began to see a conglomeration of what he loosely called religious states, each different and yet each serving to unify experience in the light of its particular “natural features”.  These natural features would appear as the ordinary temperaments and inclinations of the soul.

Ruburt tuned in to that unwritten book.  It carried the stamp of James’s own emotional state at that “time”, when he was viewing his earthly experience, in your terms, from the standpoint of one who had died, could look back, and see where he thought his ideas were valid and where they were not.  At that point in his existence, there were changes.  The plan for the book existed, and still does.  In Ruburt’s “present”, he was able to see this world view as expressed within James’s immortal mind.

To do this, Ruburt had to be free enough to accept the view of reality as perceived by someone else.  To accomplish this, Ruburt allowed one portion of his consciousness to remain securely anchored in its own reality while letting another portion soak up, so to speak, a reality not its own.

The unknown reality: Again, because of your precise orientation you are often theoretically intrigued by the contemplation of worlds not your own.  And while you may often yearn for some evidence of those other realities, you are just as apt to become scandalized by the very evidence that you have so earnestly requested.

Ruburt has embarked upon his own journeys into the unknown reality.  I cannot do that for him.  I can only point out the way, as I do for each reader.  In his own new book (Politics) Ruburt has his personal way of explaining what he is experiencing, and since he shares the same reality with you, then you will be able to relate – perhaps better, even – to his explanations than to mine.

However, it is quite possible for him to tune in to James’s complete book if he desires to, for that work is indeed a psychic reality, a plan or a model existing in the inward order of activity.

Such creative “architect’s plans” are often unknowingly picked up by others, altered or changed, ending up as entirely new productions.  Most writers do not examine their sources that closely.  The same applies, of course, to any field of endeavor.  Many quite modern and sophisticated developments have existed in what you think of now as past civilizations.  The plans, as models, were picked up by inventors, scientists, and the like, and altered to their own specific directions, so that they emerged in your world not as copies but as something new.  Many so-called archaeological discoveries were made when individuals suddenly tuned in to a world view of another person not of your space or time.  Before you have the confidence to leave your own particular home station, however, you must be secure within it.  You must know it will “be there” when you get back.

Ruburt has trained himself to deal with words as a writer.  When he picks up a world view that belongs to someone else, he can quite automatically translate it faithfully enough in that idiom of language.  Many artists do the same thing, translating inner “models” into paint, lines, and form.

So do scientists and inventors often tune in to the world views of others – living or dead, in your terms – that correlate with their own intents, talents, and purposes.

These “other”, reinterpreted world views form a matrix from which new creativity emerges.  The same thing applies in more mundane endeavors in ordinary life.  For example: You may be in a predicament that seems beyond solving.  It may be highly individual, since it is yours.  It is unique, and has happened in no other way before.  No one else has viewed your particular dilemma through your eyes, yet others have been in similar situations, solved the challenges involved, and gone on to greater creativity and fulfillment.  If you can momentarily abandon your private world view, that focus from which you experience reality, then you can allow the experience of others who have had similar challenges to color your perception.  You can tune in to their solutions and apply them to your particular circumstances.  You often do this unconsciously.  I do not want you to think, then, that such occurrences work only in esoteric terms.

Many people working with the Ouija board or automatic writing receive messages that seem, or purport, to come from historic personages.  Often, however, the material is vastly inferior to that which could have been produced by the person in question during his or her existence.  Any comparison with the material received to the written books or accounts already existing would immediately show glaring discrepancies.

Yet in many such instances, the Ouija board operator or automatic writer is to some extent or another tuning in to a world view, struggling to open roads of perception free enough to perceive an altered version of reality, but not equipped enough through training and temperament, perhaps, to express it.

The most legitimate instances of communication between the living and the dead occur in an intimate personal framework, in which a dead parent makes contact with its offspring: or a husband or wife freshly out of physical reality appears to his or her mate.  But very seldom do historic personages make contact, except with their own intimate circles.

There is great energy, however, in those who have persevered enough to become generally known in their time, and the great impetus of that psychic and mental energy does not cease at death, but continues.  In their way others may tune in to that continuing world view; and, picking it up, can be convinced that they are in contact with the physical personality who held it.

You are so used to your own private interpretation of reality that when you allow yourselves to stray from it, you immediately want to interpret your new experience in terms that make sense to your familiar orientation.  You are also highly involved with symbols.  In ordinary life you often hamper your own creativity.  When you use the Ouija board or trance procedures, you frequently free philosophical areas of your mind that have been frozen.  The resulting information then definitely seems to come from outside of yourself, and because you are literal-minded you try to interpret such experiences in a literal way.  The material must come from a philosopher, therefore, and since it certainly seems profound to your usual mundane organization, then it appears that such information must originate with a profound mind certainly not your own.

You may signify this to yourself symbolically, so that the board or the automatic writing designates its origin as being Socrates or Plato.  If you are spiritualistically oriented, the information may come from a famous psychic recently dead.  Instead, you yourself have momentarily escaped from your accustomed world view, or home program; you are reaching out into other levels of reality, but still interpreting your experiences in old terms.  Therefore, much of its creativity escapes you.

You are each as valid as Socrates or Plato.  Your influences reach through the entire framework of actuality in ways that you do not understand.  Socrates and Plato – and William James – specialized in certain fashions.  You know these individuals as names of people that existed – but in your terms, and in your terms only, those existences represented the flowering aspects of their personalities.  They often dwelled nameless upon the face of the earth, as many of you do, in your terms only, now, before reaching what you think of as those summits.

Aside: Consciousness

There are, in those terms, gradations.  When I used the word “conscious” (or “consciousness”), I meant it as I thought you understood it.  I thought that you meant: conscious of being conscious, or placing yourself on the one hand outside of a portion of your own consciousness – viewing it and then saying, “I am conscious of my consciousness”.

Consciousness is always conscious of itself, and of its validity and integrity, and in those terms there is no unconsciousness.

When I use the term time-wise, I refer it to the formation of a structure from which one kind of consciousness then views itself, sees itself as unique, and then tries to form other kinds of conscious structures.  A fly is conscious of itself, fulfilled within that reality, and feels no need to form an “extension” of that awareness from which to view its own existence.

In your terms, time considerations involved extensions of that kind of consciousness, in which separations could occur and divisions could be made.  In terms of an organic structure, this could be likened to developing another arm or leg, or protrusion or filament – another method of locomotion through another kind of dimension.

The fly is intensely conscious, at every moment engrossed in itself and its environment, precisely tuned to elements of which you are “unconscious”.  There are simply different kinds of consciousness, and you cannot basically compare one to the other any more than you can compare, say, a toad to a star to an apple to a thought to a woman to a child to a native to a suburbanite to a spider to a cat.  They are varieties of consciousness, each focused upon its own view of reality, each containing experience that others exclude.