Session 753

Nature of the Psyche, Session 753

As the earth is composed of many environments, so is the psyche.  As there are different continents, islands, mountains, seas, and peninsulas, so the psyche takes various shapes.  If you live in one country, you often consider natives in other areas of the world as foreigners, while of course they see you in the same light.  In those terms, the psyche contains many other levels of reality.  From your point of view these might appear alien, and yet they are as much a part of your psyche as your motherland is a portion of the earth.

Different countries follow different kinds of constitutions, and even within any geographical area there may be various local laws followed by the populace.  For example, if you are driving a car you may discover to your chagrin that the local speed limit in one small town is miles slower than in another.  In the same manner, different portions of the psyche exist with their own local “laws”, their different kinds of “government”.  They each possess their own characteristic geography.

If you are traveling around the world, you have to make frequent time adjustments.  When you travel through the psyche, you will also discover that your own time is automatically squeezed out of shape.  If for a moment you try to imagine that you were able to carry your own time with you on such a journey, all packaged neatly in a wristwatch, then you would be quite amazed at what would happen.

As you approached the boundaries of certain psychic lands, the wristwatch would run backwards.  As you entered other kingdoms of the psyche, your watch would go faster or slower.  Now, if time suddenly ran backward you would notice it.  If it ran faster or slower enough, you would also notice the differences.  If time ran backward very slowly, and according to the conditions, you might not be aware of the difference, because it would take so much “time” to get from the present moment to the one “before” it that you might be struck, instead, simply with the feeling that something was familiar, as if it had happened before.

In other lands of the psyche, however, even stranger events might occur.  The watch itself might change shape, or turn heavy as a rock, or as light as a gas, so that you could not read the time at all.  Or the hands might never move.  Different portions of the psyche are familiar with all of these mentioned occurrences – because the psyche straddles any of the local laws that you recognize as “official”, and has within itself the capacity to deal with an infinite number of reality-experiences.

Now: Obviously your physical body has capacities that few of you use to full advantage.  But beyond this, the species itself possesses the possibilities for adaptations that allow it to exist and persist in the physical environment under drastically varying circumstances.  Hidden within the corporal biological structure there are latent specializations that would allow the species to continue, and that take into consideration any of the planetary changes that might occur for whatever reasons.

The psyche, however, while being earth-tuned in your experience, also has many other systems of reality “to contend with”.  Each psyche, then, contains within it the potentials, abilities, and powers that are possible, or capable of actualization under any conditions.

The psyche, your psyche, can record and experience time backward, forward – or sideways through systems of alternate presents – or it can maintain its own integrity in a no-time environment.  The psyche is the creator of time complexes.  Theoretically, the most fleeting moment of your day can be prolonged endlessly.  This would not be a static elongation, however, but a vivid delving into that moment, from which all time as you think of it, past and future and all its probabilities, might emerge.

If you are reading this book, you have already become weary with official concepts.  You have already begun to sense those greater dimensions of your being.  You are already to step aside from all conventionalized doctrines, and to some extent or another you are impatient to examine and experience the natural flowing nature that is your birthright.  That birthright has long been clothed in symbols and mythologies.

Consciousness forms symbols.  It is not the other way around.  Symbols are great exuberant playthings.  You can build with them as you can with children’s blocks.  You can learn from them, as once you piled alphabet blocks together in a stack at school.  Symbols are as natural to your minds as trees are to the earth.  There is a difference, however, between a story told to children about forests, and a real child in a real woods.  Both the story and the woods are “real”.  But in your terms the child entering the real woods becomes involved in its life cycle, treads upon the leaves that fell yesterday, rests beneath trees far older than his or her memory, and looks up at night to see a moon that will soon disappear.  Looking at an illustration of the woods may give a child some excellent imaginative experiences, but they will be of a different kind, and the child knows the difference.

If you mistake the symbols for the reality, however, you will program your experience, and you will insist that each forest look like the pictures in your book.  In other words, you will expect your own experiences with various portions of your psyche to be more or less the same.  You will take your local laws with you, and you will try to tell psychic time with a wristwatch.

We will have to use some of your terms, however, particularly in the beginning.  Other terms with which you are familiar, we will squeeze out of all recognition.  The reality of your own being cannot be defined by anyone but you, and then your own definition must be understood as a reference point at best.  The psychologist, the priest, the physicist, the philosopher or the guru, can explain your own psyche to you only insofar as those specialists can forget that they are specialists, and deal directly with the private psyche from which all specializations come.