Session 759

Nature of the Psyche, Session 759

Again: Your dreaming psyche is awake.

It deals with a different kind of experience than the one with which you are physically familiar, although that experience is also a part of the psyche.  Daily life is a focus taken on the part of that portion of the psyche which you call you, and there are many other such focuses.  The psyche is never destroyed.  Nor is that unique individuality of your own ever minimized.  The psyche’s experiences straddle your ideas of time, however.  It seems to you quite definitely that you come alive and die.  At your particular focus of consciousness, no arguments will suffice to convince you otherwise, for you are everywhere presented with the physical evidence of “fact”.

You may believe in an afterlife to some extent or another, or you may or may not be convinced by the general theory of reincarnation.  But certainly most of you are united in the seemingly irrefutable belief that you are definitely alive now, and not dead.  Dead people do not read books.

On the other hand, dead people do not usually write books either – now do they?

In a strange manner I am telling you that your “life” is simply the only portion of your existence of which you are presently aware.  In greater terms, you are alive and dead at the same time, even as I am.  My focus, however, is in an area that you do not perceive.  Again: Existences are like notes played along certain frequencies.  You are tuned in to an earth song, following this analogy, but you are only following your own melody, and usually you are unaware of the greater orchestration in which you also take part.

Sometimes in dreams you do tune in to a greater picture, but again, certain things appear to be facts, and against these so-called facts even definite experiences can appear ludicrous or chaotic.

Last night our friend, Joseph, had a dream experience that intrigued him, and yet seemed highly distorted.  He found himself greeting a large number of people.  He believed them to be family members, though he only recognized some.  His parents, known to be dead, were there.  A brother and a sister-in-law, who are alive, were also present.  The brother was definitely himself, yet somehow altered in appearance, his features having an Oriental cast.  The entire dream was very pleasant, and seemed to be like a home coming.

Joseph wondered, however, at this mixture of the living and the dead.  It would be easy to think that the dream foresaw Joseph’s own death and that of his brother and sister-in-law.  You follow your own time sequences, however.  The psyche is not so limited.  To it, your death has already occurred, from your standpoint.  Yet it is also true that from its standpoint, your birth has not yet happened.  You have a greater experience, then, of your recognized time and existence frameworks.

There, you can meet with relatives long dead, or with children not yet born.  There, you can meet other portions of your own personhood that exist simultaneously with your own.

In that framework the so-called living and the so-called dead can mix freely.  In such circumstances you are literally becoming aware of other perspectives of existence.  You are turning corners of being and discovering multidimensional depths of the psyche.

Artists use perspective on a flat surface to try to capture there the feelings and experiences of depth that are, in themselves, alien to the flat canvas, or paper or board.  The artist may vividly evoke the image of a disappearing road that appears to be broad in the picture’s foreground, only to turn smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish in some distant hidden point.  No physical person will walk that road, however.  An ant crawling upon such a canvas would hasten across just another flat surface, and be quite unaware of the inviting avenue and any painted fields or mountains.

Now in the dream state, you suddenly become aware on occasion of greater perspective.  This perspective cannot “work” at your usual level of consciousness, any more than the artist’s perspective will work for the ant’s – though there is much you could learn from an ant’s consciousness.

Your own waking consciousness deals specifically with certain kinds of distinctions.  These help form the very structure of physical existence.  They highlight your lives, providing them also with a kind of frame.  Quite simply, you want to experience a certain kind of reality, so you put boundaries about events, that allow you to concentrate upon them.  When an artist paints a picture, he uses discrimination.  He or she chooses one area of concentration.  Everything within the painting fits; so in your physical lives, you do the same thing.

The artist knows that many pictures can be painted, and holds in mind paintings already produced and those in the planning stage as well.  So the psyche holds equally lives in progress, lived or not yet lived, and deals with a greater perspective from which your ordinary perspective emerges.

I often speak of you and the psyche as if they were separate, yet of course this is not the case.  You are that portion of the psyche that you presently recognize.  Many people say: “I want to know myself”, or “I want to find myself”, when the truth is that few really want to take the time or effort.  There is one place to begin, however: Try becoming better acquainted with the self you are now.  Stop telling yourself that you do not know yourself.

There is little use in trying to discover other levels of your own reality if you insist upon applying the laws of physical life to your own larger experience.  Then you will always be in a quandary, and no facts will fit.  You cannot, however, insist that the laws of your vaster existence, as you discover them, supersede the physical condition of known life – for then no facts would apply either.  You will expect to live forever in the same physical body, or think that you can levitate with your body at will.  You can indeed levitate, but not with your physical body, practically speaking in operational terms.  You accepted a body, and that body will die.  It has limitations, but these also serve to highlight certain kinds of experience.  The body in which our friend, Joseph, viewed his relatives (in the dream mentioned earlier) was not operationally physical.  It was quite real, however, and at another level of reality it was operational, suited to its environment.

Now, in many ways you simply have a brief attention span.

The “true facts” are that you exist in this life and outside it simultaneously.  You are “between lives” and “in lives” at once.  The deeper dimensions of reality are such that your thoughts and actions not only affect the life you know, but also reach into all of those other simultaneous existences.  What you think now is unconsciously perceived by some hypothetical 14^th-century self.  The psyche is open-ended.  No system is closed, psychological systems least of all.  Your life is a dreaming experience to other portions of your greater reality which focus elsewhere.

Their experiences are also a part of your dream heritage.

You may ask how real are those other existences, but if so you must ask in whose terms.  Existence has a physical version.  In that framework you are born and die, and in a definite sequence.  Death is a physical reality.  It is real, however, only in physical terms.  If you accept those terms as the only criterion of reality, then surely it appears that death is an end to your consciousness.

If, however, you learn to know yourself better in daily life to become more fully aware even of your earthly life, then you will indeed receive other information that hints of a deeper, more supportive reality, in which physical existence rests.  You will find yourself having experiences that do not fit recognized facts.  These can add up to an alternate set of facts, pointing toward a different kind of reality, and give evidence for an inner existence that takes precedence over the physical assumptions.  A certain kind of discretion and understanding is necessary, however.  Basically the inner reality is the creative source of the physical one.  Yet to some extent, the physical rules are also inviolate – at their level.

You can learn to vastly enrich your own experience.  Theoretically, you can even become aware of other existences to some degree.  You can travel in the dream state into levels of reality separated from your own.  You can learn to use and experience time in new fashions.  You can obtain knowledge from other portions of your own being, and tap the psyche’s resources.  You can improve the world in which you live, and the quality of life.  But while you are physical, you will still experience birth and death, dawn and dusk, and the privacy of the moments, for this is the experience you have chosen.

Even within that context, however, there are surprises and enchantments waiting, if you simply learn to expand your awareness, exploring not only the dream state, but your waking reality in more adventuresome ways.  Your dreaming psyche is awake.  Many of you have allowed your normal waking consciousness to become blurred – inactive, relatively speaking, so that you are only half aware of the life that you have.  You are your psyche’s living expression, its human manifestation.  Yet you allow yourselves often to become blind to brilliant aspects of your own existence.

In Joseph’s dream, his brother’s features had an Oriental cast.  Joseph knew that his brother lived as himself, and also as an Oriental, unknown to Joseph in his present life.  If Joseph had seen two people – one his brother and one an Oriental – he would not have recognized the stranger, so in the dream his brother’s known appearance dominated, while the Oriental affiliation is merely suggested.  In your own lives you will use such psychic shorthand, or utilize symbols in which you try to explain the greater dimensions of one reality in terms of the known one.

Again, the dimensions of the psyche must be experienced, to whatever degree.  They cannot be simply defined.  In the following chapter, then, I will suggest some exercises that will allow you direct experience with portions of your own reality that may have escaped you thus far.

Chapter 3: Association, the Emotions, and a Different Frame of Reference

You normally organize your experience in terms of time.  Your usual stream of consciousness is also highly associative, however.  Certain events in the present will remind you of past ones, for example, and sometimes your memory of the past will color present events.

Association or no, physically you will remember events in time, with present moments neatly following past ones.  The psyche deals largely with associative processes, however, as it organizes events through association.  time as such has little meaning in that framework.  Associations are tied together, so to speak, by emotional experience.  In a large manner, the emotions defy time.