Session 799

Nature of the Psyche, Session 799

A dissertation on the nature of man, for your edification.

You realize that a tiger, following its nature, is not evil.  Looking at your own species you are often less kindly, less compassionate, less understanding.  It is easy to condemn your own kind.

It may be difficult for you to understand, but your species means well.  You understand that the tiger exists in a certain environment, and reacts according to his nature.  So does man.  Even his atrocities are committed in a distorted attempt to reach what he considers good goals.  He fails often to achieve the goals, or even to understand how his very methods prevent their attainment.

He is indeed as blessed as the animals, however, and his failures are the results of his lack of understanding.  He is directly faced with a far more complex conscious world than the other animals are, dealing particularly with symbols and ideas that are then projected outward into reality, where they are to be tested.  If they could be tested mentally in your context, there would be no need for physical human existence.

Too many complicated issues are connected here, so that I must at best simplify.  It is as if man said: “Now what about this idea?  What can we do with it?  What will happen if we toss it out into reality, physically?  How far can we go with any of the great social, scientific, religious ideas that are so peculiarly the offshoots of man’s mind?”

If such issues could all be mentally worked out on some nonphysical drawing board, again, the great challenge of physical existence would be neither necessary nor meaningful.  How far, say, can nationalism be carried?  To what extent can the world be treated as if it were external to man, as an object?  What can man learn by treating the body as if it were a machine?  As if it were a mirage?  As if it were driven by blind instinct?  As if it were possessed by a soul?

To some extent, these are all unique and creative ponderings that on the part of the animals alone would be considered the most curious and enlightening intellectual achievements.  The animals must relate to the earth, and so must man.  As the animal must play, mate, hunt his prey or eat his berries within the physical context of sun, ground, trees, snow, hail and wind, so in a different way man must pursue his ideas by clothing them in the elemental realities of earth, by perceiving them as events.

When he is destructive, man does not seek to be destructive per se; but in a desire to achieve that which he thinks of as a particular goal that to him is good, he forgets to examine the goodness of his methods.

One animal chasing and killing its prey serves the greater purpose of preserving the balance of nature, whether or not the animal is aware of this – and again, the animal’s intent is not evil.  Man consumes ideas.  In so doing he contributes to a different kind of balance, of which he is usually unaware.  But no man truly acts out of the pure intent to do wrong, or to be vicious.  Storms rend the summer sky, sending forth thunder and lightning.  Earthquakes may ravage the countryside.  You may deeply regret the havoc worked, knowing that neither the storm nor the earthquake is evil.  Not only did you have no wrong intent, but the overall condition corrected the earth’s balance.

This requires some unique understanding.  I am aware of that – and yet the destructive storms worked by mankind ultimately cannot be said to be any more evil than the earthquake.  While man’s works may often certainly appear destructive, you must not blame man’s intent, nor must you ever make the error of confusing man with his works.  For many well-intentioned artists, with the best of intentions, produce at times shoddy works of art, all the more disappointing and deplorable to them because of the initial goodness of their intent.

Their lack of knowledge and techniques and methods then become quite plain.  By concentrating too deeply upon the world of newspapers and the negative reports of man’s actions, it is truly easy to lose sight of what I tell you is each man’s and woman’s basic good intent.

That intent may be confused, poorly executed, tangled amid conflicts of beliefs, strangled by the bloody hands of murders and wars – and yet no man or woman ever loses it.  That represents the hope of the species, and it has ever remained lit, like a bright light within each member of the species; and that good intent is handed down through the generations.  It is far more potent, that illumination, than any hates or national grudges that may be passed along.

It is imperative, for any peace of mind, that you believe in that existence of man’s innate good intent.

It is shared by all of the other animals.  Each animal knows that under certain conditions the other may fight or posture aggressively, or defend its nest.  Each animal knows that in time of hunger it might be hunted by another.  Except for those situations, however, the animals are not afraid of each other.  They know that each other animal is of good intent.

Grant your own species the same.

Make a distinction in your mind between man and man’s works.  Argue all you want against his works, as you read in your newspapers of errors, stupidities, treachery or war.  Collect pages and reams of such material if it suits your fancy – and I am speaking not only to you, or to Ruburt, but to anyone who hopes to find a hint of truth, peace of mind, or creativity.

Collect books of man’s failures.  I do not personally know why anyone would collect the worst works of any artist, and get pleasure in ripping them apart.  Man has produced some fine works: The high level of verbal communication, the multitudinous varieties of emotional interactions and of cultural exchange, the facility with exteriorization of ideas and concepts, the reaches of the imagination – all of these, and many others, are unique in the universe.

To identify man with his poorest works is to purposefully seek out the mars, the mistakes, of a fine artist, and then to condemn him.  To do this is to condemn yourselves personally.  If a scientist says consciousness is the result of chance, or Darwin’s theories say that basically man is a triumphant son of murders, many people object.  If you say, however, that men are idiots, or that they are not worth the ground they walk upon, you are saying the same thing.  For you must be concerned with this reality as you know it; in those terms, to condemn man is to condemn the species as you know it, and the practical terms of your world.

To say that people can escape to another probability is pragmatically a cop-out – this is apart from the reality of probabilities, for I am speaking from your emotional viewpoint.

Physically your body has a stance in space and time.  I will speak of primary and secondary experience.  Let us call primary experience that which exists immediately in sense terms in your moment of time – the contact of body with environment.  I am creating certain divisions here to make our discussion – or monologue – easier.  Therefore, I will call secondary experience that information that comes to you through, say, reading, television, discussion with others, letters, and so forth.

The secondary kind of experience is largely symbolic.  This should be clear.  Reading about a war in the middle of a quiet, sunny afternoon is not the same thing as being in the war, however vivid the description.  Reading about the energy shortage is not the same as sitting in a cold house.  Reading about the possible annihilation of mankind through nuclear destruction or other stupidities, while you are sitting calmly enough in your living room, is obviously far divorced from the actuality described in an article.

At the levels with which you are concerned, the body must primarily react to present, immediate, primary existence in space and time.  At other levels it is equipped to handle many kinds of data, in that I have mentioned before the precognition of cells.  But the body depends on the conscious mind to give it a clear assessment of precise conditions of the space and time it occupies.  It depends upon that knowledge.

If you are safely ensconced in a comfortable room, in no present danger, your senses should accurately convey that information.  Your conscious mind should assimilate it.  It should be an easy enough accomplishment to look around you and see that you are in no danger.

Your conscious mind is meant to give your body an assessment of what I will call cultural conditions, for there are sophistications and specifications that in your terms consciousness alone can assess.  If, under conditions naturally safe in the terms of primary experience, you become overwhelmed by unsafe signals from secondary experience – that is, from your reading or whatever – you show a lack of discrimination.  You are not able to differentiate between the physically safe present situation, and the imagined, which is perhaps unsafe, calling forth the alarms of danger.

The body mechanisms become highly disoriented.  The signals to the body are very contradictory, so that after a while, if such conditions continue, you can no longer tell whether you are in actual danger or imagined danger.  Your mind then forces your body to be in a state of constant alert – but more unfortunately, you train yourself to ignore your direct, sensual feedback in the present moment.

Your body then might say you are safe, and your senses show you that no danger is present – yet you have begun to rely so upon the secondary experience that you do not trust your creature reactions.

Because of man’s great gift of imagination, however, the alarm signals not only invade a safe present moment, but go jangling into the next one and the one following, and are endlessly projected into the future.  To whatever extent, and in whatever fashion, each individual is therefore robbed of his or her belief in the personal ability to act meaningfully or with purpose in the present.

The body cannot act tomorrow, today.  Its sense data must be clear.  This resulting feeling of powerlessness to act leads to a state of hopelessness of varying degrees – and that mood does not tie itself to specific details, but pervades emotional life if it is allowed to.  To whatever degree, the condemning, critical material too often becomes self-prophesying – for those who put merit on it allow it to cloud their reactions.

In your terms, while you live, and in the most pertinent terms of intimate sensation, your reality must be what you perceive in the framework of your time, and what you create within that framework as it is experienced.  Therefore, I entreat you not to behave as if man will destroy himself in some future – not to behave as if man is an imbecile, doomed to extinction, a dimwitted, half-crazy animal with a brain gone amuck.

None of the prophesied destruction man so fears is a reality in your time; nor, for all of the critical prophets through the ages, and the forerunners of doom, has the creativity of man destroyed itself in those terms.

There are those who make careers of condemning the faults and failings of others, or of the species itself, and because of that attitude man’s great energy and good intent remain invisible.  Man is in the process of becoming.  His works are flawed – but they are the flawed apprentice works of a genius artist in the making, whose failures are indeed momentous and grotesque only in the light of his sensed genius, which ever leads him and directs him onward.

When you are considering the future in your terms, constructive achievements are as realistic as destructive ones.  In those terms, each year of man’s existence in fact justifies a more optimistic rather than pessimistic view.  You cannot place man’s good intent outside of the physical context, for outside of that context you do not have the creature that you know.  You cannot say that nature is good, but spawned man, which is a cancer upon it, for nature would have better sense.  You cannot say, either that “Nature” will destroy man if he offends her, or that “Nature” has little use for its own species, but only wants to promote “Life” for “Nature” is within each member of each species; and without each member of each species, “Nature” could be nonexistent.

Because you are natural creatures, within you there is a natural state of being.  That state can be an ever-present reservoir of peace, vitality, and understanding.

Whatever your scientists think, your body and your consciousness and your universe spring constantly into actualization.  Therefore, through cultivating the clear experience of your own consciousness and being with time and with the moment as you feel it, you can draw upon the greater vitality and power that is available.

To do this, rely upon your immediate sense data, not secondary experience as described.  That primary sense data, while pinpointed in the present, providing you with the necessary stance in time, still can open up to you the timelessness from which all time emerges, can bring you intuitive intimations, hinting at the true nature of the ever-present coming-to-be of the universe.

That kind of experience will let you glimpse the larger patterns of man’s creativity, and your part in it.  You have been taught to concentrate upon criticisms and faults in your society; and in your times it seems that everything will work out wrong – that left alone the world will run down, the universe will die, man will destroy himself; and these beliefs so infiltrate your behavior that they organize much of your experience and rob you of the benefits nature itself everywhere provides in direct primary experience.

Often then you ignore your senses’ reality in the world – the luxurious vitality and comfort of the daily moment – by exaggerating the importance of secondary experience as defined for this discussion.

The most negative projection or prophecy seems to be the most practical one; when you are reading of the world’s ills, you say in all honesty, and with no humor: “How can I ignore the reality, the destructive reality, of the present?”  In the most practical, immediate, mundane terms, however, you and your world are in that moment naturally and physically safe, as your bodily senses immediately perceive.  In the most basic of bodily terms you are not reacting to present conditions.

This would be only too clear if you were physically experiencing the conditions about which you might be reading.  If the world were falling about your shoulders, you would only too clearly understand that “earlier” you were reacting to an imagined and not a real situation.

I am afraid that I think some of this will still escape you – meaning Ruburt, yourself, and others.  But while disasters, imagined or encountered second-handedly, may in fact later occur, they are far different from physically encountered ones.  You only add to their unfortunate nature by negatively brooding upon what might happen in the future, and you destroy your own stance.  Your stance in time is highly important, for it is your practical base of operations.

You must trust your sense data in that regard.  Otherwise you confuse your psychological and corporal stance, for the body cannot be in a situation of safety and danger at the same time.  It wastes its resources fighting imaginary battles’

To some people wars, poverty, murder, treachery, corruption, are primary experience, and must be dealt with – as requiring immediate action.  The body must react.  Such persons are beaten up, or robbed.  Those are immediate sense data, and in one way or another they do react.  However feebly, their point of power corresponds immediately with the point of danger.

You cannot react physically in the same way to projected or imagined dangers.  There seems to be no possible reaction.  You are frustrated.  You are meant to deal with your immediate, primary experience, and in so doing you take care of your responsibility.  You are able to take action in your own experience, and therefore affect others.  You do not have to be ignorant of wars in other corners of the world, or close your eyes.  But if you allow those experiences to overcloud your present, valid intersection with reality, then you speak and act from a position not your own, and deny the world whatever benefits your own present version of reality might allow you to give.

The natural creature-validity of your senses must remain clear, and only then can you take full advantage of those intuitions and visions that must come through your own private intersection with space and time.

In those terms, the ever-actual integrity of nature everywhere surrounds you.  It represents your direct experience.  It offers comfort, creativity, and inspiration that you only impede if you allow secondary experience to supersede your daily moment-to-moment encounter with the physical earth.

Session 798

Nature of the Psyche Session 798

Your next question is easy to anticipate, of course, for you will want to know the origin of that “interior” universe from which I have said the exterior one ever emerges – and here we must part company with treasured objectivity, and enter instead a mental domain, in which it is seen that contradictions are not errors; an inner domain large enough to contain contradictions at one level, for at another level they are seen to be no contradictions at all.

In science as it stands, it is necessary that self-contradictions do not arise.  If a hypothesis is “proven true”, then it cannot be proven false – or, of course, it was never true to begin with.

In those terms, therefore, the universe either had “a Creator”, or it had none; or it came into being as stated in the Big Bang theory, and is either constantly expanding or it is not.  Evolution exists or it does not.  As a rule, such theories are proven “true” by the simple process of excluding anything else that seems contradictory, and so generally your scientific theories carry the weight of strong validity within their own frameworks.

In those frameworks you have made certain classifications that now appear quite obvious.  Common sense upholds them, and it seems impossible to consider reality otherwise.  Yet by their nature such categories structure your experience of reality itself to such an extent that any alternate ways of perceiving life seem not only untrustworthy, but completely impossible.

Thusly, your classifications of various species appear to you as the only logical kinds of divisions that could be made among living things.  Quite the contrary is the case, however.  That particular overall method of separation leads to such questions as: “Which species came first, and which came later, and how did the various species emerge – one from the other?”  Those questions are further brought about by your time classifications, without which they would be meaningless.

Your classifications in such respects set up exterior divisions.  Now these serve as quite handy reference points, but basically speaking they in no way affect the natural experience of those various living creatures that you refer to as “other species”.

Your specializations work as long as you stay within the framework, though then you must wrestle with the questions that such divisions automatically entail.  It is perhaps difficult for you to realize that these are written and verbalized categories that in no real manner tell you anything about the actual experience of other creatures – but only note habits, tendencies, and separations of the most exterior nature.

If your purpose is to comprehend what other living creatures perceive, then the methods you are using are at the best shortsighted, and at the worst they completely defeat your purpose.  For example: No matter what information or data you receive as the result of animal experimentation or dissection for scientific purposes, and no matter how valuable the results appear to be, the consequences of such methods are so distorted that you comprehend less of life than you did before.

The answers to the origins of the universe and of the species lie, I’m afraid, in realms that you have largely ignored – precisely in those domains that you have considered least scientific, and in those that it appeared would yield the least practical results.

Your present methods will simply bring you pat, manufactured results and answers.  They will satisfy neither the intellect nor the soul.  Since your universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of your own existence, you must look where you have not before – into the reality of your minds and emotions.  You must look to the natural universe that you know.  You must look with your intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about you, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

You must study the quality of life, dare to follow the patterns of your own thoughts and emotions, and to ride that mobility, for in that mobility there are hints of the origin of the universe and of the psyche.  The poet’s view of the universe and of nature is more scientific, then, than the scientist’s, for more of nature is comprehended.

The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet, understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classifications of all the world’s flowers.  Information is not necessarily knowledge or comprehension.

Thoughts spring into your mind as the objective universe swims into reality – that is, in the same fashion.  Diagramming sentences tells you little about the spoken language, and nothing about those miraculous physical and mental performances that allow you to speak – and so diagramming the species of the world is, in the same way, quite divorced from any true understanding.

The subjective feeling of your being, your intimate experience from moment-to-moment – these possess the same mysterious quality that it seems to you the universe possesses.  You are mortal, and everywhere encounter evidence of that mortality, and yet within its framework your feelings and thoughts have a reality to you personally that transcends all such classifications.  You know that physically you will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somewhere eternal.

Through such feelings the psyche breaks through all misconceptions, hinting at the nature of the self and of the universe at once.

In a larger level of actuality, then, there is no beginning or end to the universe, and at that level there are no contradictions.  There is no beginning or end to the psyche, either.  You may say: “Granted”, yet persist, saying: “In our terms however, when did the world begin, and in what manner?”  Yet the very attempt to place such an origin in time makes almost any answer distorted.

The truth is that the answers lie in your own experience.  They are implied in your own spontaneous behavior – that is, in the wondrous activity of your bodies and minds.

You walk quite well without having at your fingertips any conscious knowledge of the inner mechanism’s activity.  You may have been told, or you may have read about the body’s anatomy, and the interaction of its parts.  Yet whether or not you have such information, you walk quite as well.  Such data therefore do not help your walking performance any.

For that matter, an athlete may have a great zest for motion and an impatience with reading, caring not what within the body makes it move as long as its performance is superb – while an invalid with great book knowledge about all of the body’s parts is quite unable to physically perform in a normal manner.

Your body knows how to walk.  The knowledge is built-in and acted upon.  The body knows how to heal itself, how to use its nourishment, how to replace its tissues, yet in your terms the body itself has no access to the kind of information the mind possesses.  Being so ignorant, how does it perform so well?

If it were scientifically inclined, the body would know that such spontaneous performance was impossible, for science cannot explain the reality of life itself in its present form, much less its origins.

Consciousness within the body knows that its existence is within the body’s context, and apart from it at the same time.  In ordinary life during the day consciousness often takes a recess, so to speak – it daydreams, or otherwise experiences itself as somewhat apart from the body’s reality.  At night, in sleep, the self’s consciousness takes longer, freer recesses from physical reality, and does this as spontaneously as the body itself walks.  These experiences are not hypothetical.  They happen to each person.  On such occasions, each person is to some extent aware of a kind of comprehension that is not dependent upon the accumulation of data, but of a deeper kind of experience and direct encounter with the reality from which the world emerges.

This is the kind of wordless knowledge the body possesses, that brings forth your physical motion and results in the spectacular preciseness of bodily response.  It is, then, highly practical.  In your terms, the same force that formed the world forms your subjective reality now, and is a source of the natural universe.

Exploring those realities lovingly will bring you into direct contact with inner dimensions of your being, providing intuitive understandings that are of greatest import.

The motion of the universe appears in the motion of your own intimate experience, and in that seemingly most nebulous area the answers will be found.

Session 797

Nature of the Psyche, Session 797

When you ask about the beginning of a universe, you are speaking of a visible universe.

There is consciousness within each conceivable hypothetical point within the universe.  There is therefore “an invisible universe” out of which the visible or objective universe springs.

I do not mean to overemphasize the point that this particular material is most difficult to explain, yet I can hardly stress the issue too strongly.

Your universe did not emerge at any one point, therefore, or with any one initial cell – but everywhere it began to exist at once, as the inner pulsations of the invisible universe reached certain intensities that “impregnated” the entire physical system simultaneously.

In this case, first of all light appeared.  At the same time EE (electromagnetic energy) units became manifest, impinging from the invisible universe into definition.  Again, because of the psychological strength of preconceived notions, I have to work my way around many of your concepts.  Yet in much of my material I have definitely implied what I am saying now, but the implications must have passed you by.

I have said, for example, that the universe expands as an idea does, and so the visible universe sprang into being in the same manner.  The whole affair is quite complicated since – again as I have intimated – the world freshly springs into new creativity at each moment.  No matter what your version of creativity, or the creation of the world, you are stuck with the questions of where such energy came from, for it seems that unimaginable energy was released more or less at one time, and that this energy must then run out.

The same energy, however, still gives birth anew to the universe.  In those terms, it is still being created.  The EE units, impressing a probable physical field, contain within them the latent knowledge of all of the various species that can emerge under those conditions.  The groupings “begin” in the invisible universe.  You can say that it took untold centuries for the EE units “initially” to combine, form classifications of matter and various species; or you can say that this process happened at once.  It is according to your relative position, but the physical universe was everywhere seeded, impregnated, simultaneously.  On the other hand, this still happens, and there is no real “coming-in” point.

You distinguish between consciousness and your own version, which you consider consciousness of self.  When I speak of atoms and molecules having consciousness, I mean that they possess a consciousness of themselves as identities.  I do not mean that they love or hate, in your terms, but that they are aware of their own separateness, and aware of the ways in which that separateness cooperates to form other organizations.

They are innately aware, in fact, of all such probable cooperative ventures, and imbued with the “drive” for value fulfillment.  Every known species was inherently “present” with the overall impregnation of the visible universe, then.

If the universe were a painting, for example, the painter would not have first painted darkness, then an explosion, then a cell, then the joining together of groups of cells into a simple organism, then that organism’s multiplication into others like it, or traced a pattern from an amoeba or a paramecium on upward – but he or she would have instead begun with a panel of light, an underpainting, in which all of the world’s organisms were included, though not in detail.  Then in a creativity that came from the painting itself the colors would grow rich, the species attain their delineations, the winds blow and the seas move with the tides.

The motion and energy of the universe still come from within.  I certainly realize that this is hardly a scientific statement – yet the moment that All That Is conceived of a physical universe it was invisibly created, endowed with creativity, and bound to emerge.

Because each hypothetical, conceivable portion of the universe is conscious, the Planner is within the plan itself in the greatest of terms – perhaps basically inconceivable to you.  There is of course no “outside” into which the invisible universe materialized, since all does indeed exist in a mental, or psychic, or spiritual realm quite impossible to describe.  To you your universe seems, now, objective and real, and it seems to you that at one time at least this was not the case, so you ask about its creation and the evolution of the species.  My answer has been couched in the terms in which the question is generally asked.

While you believe in and experience the passage of time, then such questions will naturally occur to you, and in that fashion.  Within that framework they make sense.  When you begin to question the nature of time itself, then the “when” of the universe is beside the point.

Almost anyone will agree, I should hope, that the universe is a most splendid example of creativity.  Few would agree, however, that you can learn more about the nature of the universe by examining your own creativity than you can be examining the world through instruments – and here is exquisite irony, for you create the instruments of creativity, even while at the same time you often spout theories that deny to man all but the most mechanical of reactions.

In other terms, the world comes to know itself, to discover itself, for the Planner left room for divine surprise, and the plan was nowhere foreordained; nor is there anywhere, within it anything that corresponds to your survival-of-the-fittest theories.

These are creative distortions on your part, directly related to specializations of consciousness that cut you off from the greater concourse existing at other levels between the species and the land.  Again, consciousness everywhere pervades the universe, and is aware of all conditions.  The balance of nature upon your planet is no chance occurrence, but the result of constant, instant computations on the part of each most minute consciousness, whether it forms part of a rock, a person, an animal, a plant.  Each invisibly “holds space together”, whatever its station.  This is a cooperative venture.  Your own consciousness has its particular unique qualities, in that like other comparatively long-lived species, you associate your identity with your form far more rigidly.  Other kinds of consciousness “leap in and out of forms” with greatest leeway.  There is a biological understanding that exists, for example, when one animal kills another one for food.  The consciousness of the prey leaves its body under the impetus of a kind of stimulus unknown to you.

I want to be very careful here, for I am speaking of natural interplay among the animals.  This is not anywhere meant to justify the cruel slaughtering of animals by man under many circumstances.

The historical and cultural world as you know it appears to be the only one objective world, of course, with its history already written, its present, and hopefully its probable future.

It seems also that the future must be built upon that one known species or world past.  Often it may simply sound like a figure of speech when I talk about probabilities.  In many ways it may indeed appear to be almost outrageous to consider the possibility that “there is more than one earth”, or that there are many earths, each similar enough to be recognizable, yet each different in the most vital respects.

This particular house exists.  Yet you may open the door on any given day to a probable world from your immediate standpoint, and never know the difference.  This happens all the time, and I mean all the time.

You move through probabilities without knowing it.  The transitions are literally invisible to you, though they may appear as trace elements in your dreams.  As a diamond has many facets, so does your reality in that regard.

(To Rob:) Since your birth a probability has occurred that you could have followed in which your wars did not happen.  There is another probability in which the Second World War ended in nuclear destruction, and you did not enter that one either.  You chose “this” probable reality in order to ask certain questions about the nature of man – seeing him where he wavered equally between creativity and destruction, knowledge and ignorance; but a point that contained potentials for the most auspicious kinds of development, in your eyes.  The same applies to Ruburt.

In a way, man is trans-species at this point in probability.  It is a time and a probability in which every bit of help is needed, and your talents, abilities, and prejudices made you both uniquely fitted for such a drama.  At the same time, do not dwell too much upon that world situation, for a concentration upon your own nature and upon the physical nature of your world – the seasons, and so forth – allows you to refresh your own energy, and frees you to take advantage of that clear vision that is so necessary.

You each also became involved in this probability precisely to use it as a creative stimulus that would make you seek for a certain kind of understanding.  There is always a creative give-and-take between the individual and his world.  To some extent or another each of those involved in this probability chose it for their own reasons.  Saying this, however, I also say that many leave this probability for another when they have learned and contributed.

Session 796

Chapter 11: The Universe and the Psyche

Session 796

(The first half of this session came through because of a dream Jane had last night, and interpreted on her own today …)

It is often not enough – in fact, seldom enough – that deep emotional fears simply be realized once or twice.  They must be encountered more or less directly.  Otherwise the old habits allow such fears to be buried again.

So Ruburt’s dream made possible a conscious emotional realization of fear – but more, it provided for that fear’s release, or gave the solution to a deep emotional equation.  In this case it was the realization emotionally that life is not given by the parent, but through the parent – by LIFE itself, or All That Is, and “with no strings attached”.

The second part of the dream, the solution, had not come consciously and emotionally to Ruburt before.  Intellectually he had the solution, but it did not become part of the emotional equation until the dream put the two together.  You cannot logically, mathematically explain such emotional reality.

On some occasions long-term illnesses, for instance, are resolved suddenly through a dream.  However, in most cases dreams prevent such chronic illnesses, providing through small therapeutics a constant series of minor but important personal revelations.

That is, dreams are the best preventive medicine.  Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding.  Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind.  As the body handles many physical manipulations without your own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of your own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which you are not aware.

You could not physically handle anything like complete dream recall.  You are not consciously capable of dealing with the psychological depths and riches that activity reveals.  For one thing, your concepts of time, realistically or practically speaking, as utilized, would become more difficult to maintain in normal life.  This does not mean that far greater dream recall than you have is not to your advantage, because it certainly is.  I merely want to explain why so many dreams are not recalled.

While the large proportion remain relatively hidden, however, the average person often meets with dream fragments just below the normal threshold of consciousness – not recognizing them as what they are – experiencing instead the impulse to do this or that on a given day; to eat this or that, or to refrain from something else.  An easy enough example is the case where an individual with no memory [of such a dream] decides to cancel a plane trip on a given day, and later discovers that the plane crashed.  The impulse to cancel may or may not seem to have an acceptable, rational explanation; that is, for no seeming reason, the individual may simply, impulsively, feel a premonition.  On the other hand, the impulse might appear as a normal, logical change of plan.

We are taking it for granted that a forgotten dream stated the probable catastrophe.  This information was unconsciously processed, the probability considered and rejected: Psychologically or physically, the person was not ready to die.  Others with the same knowledge found that death was the accepted probability.  This does not mean that any of those people could bear consciously knowing their own decisions – or could board the plane with the conscious consequences in mind.

Nor is such an inner decision forced upon the conscious personality, for in all such instances, the conscious personality has at various times come close to accepting the idea of death at the particular time in life.

This does not mean that those people are committing suicide in the same way that a person does who takes his own life – but that in a unique psychological manipulation they no longer hold the same claim to life as they had before.  They “throw their lives to the Fates”, so to speak, saying not as they did before: “I will live”, but: “I will live or die as the Fates decide”.

They may use other terms than Fate, of course, but the vital, personal, direct, affirmative intent to live is not there.  They are headed for another reality, and ready for it.

The conscious mind, however, can only hold so much.  Life as you know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms.  The sweet parcel of physical existence, I have told you, exists as much by merit of what it does not include as it does by merit of your experience.  In important ways your dreams make your life possible by ordering your psychological life automatically, as your physical body is ordered automatically for you.  You can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree.  But you cannot become completely aware of your dreams in their entirety, and maintain your normal physical stance.

As a civilization you fail to reap dreams’ greater benefit, and the conscious mind is able to handle much more dream recall than you allow.  Such training would add immeasurably to the dimensions of your life.  Dreams educate you even in spatial relationships, and are far more related to the organism’s stance in the environment than is realized.  The child learns spatial relationships in dreams.

Ruburt had to know what he was afraid of, and his dream interpretation gave him that knowledge so that he could deal with it.  It was the fear of death – not chosen, of course – the fear that if he did not deliver, work hard, and pay his mother back for a life magically given, grudgingly given, then in a magical equation she, the mother, could take it back.  But the mother did not give the life.  The life came from All That Is, from the spirit of life itself, and was freely given – to be taken away by no one, or threatened by no one or no force, until that life fulfills its own purposes and decides to travel on.

Ruburt did feel that it was not safe to let go, lest relaxation mean death.  Life is expression.  It comes to be out of the force of itself, and no force stands against it or threatens it.  Death in your terms certainly seems an end, but it is instead a translation of life into another form.

This leads me rather naturally to my next topic.

First of all, there are verbal difficulties having to do with the definition of life.  It appears that there is living matter and nonliving matter, leading to such questions as: “How does nonliving matter become living?”

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter.  There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have ascribed to life, or living conditions – a point that meets the requirements that you have arbitrarily set.

This makes it highly difficult in a discussion, however, for there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter.  There is no point at which consciousness emerged.  Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions you call living.

If we must speak in terms of continuity, which I regret, then in those terms you could say that life in the physical universe, on your planet, “began” spontaneously in a given number of species at the same time.

There were fully developed men – that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will – living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors.  Species have come and gone of which you have no knowledge.  There are parallel developments.  That is, there were “apes” who attained their own “civilizations”, for example.  They used tools.  There were not men-to-be, nor did they evolve into men.

It is erroneous to say that they did not develop, or that their progress was stunted, for it was not.  Their reality explored the ramifications of animalhood in a completely different fashion.  Their development paralleled man’s in many respects, in that they lived simultaneously upon the earth, and shared the environment.

I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man did learn from them.  The impact of many of my statements of the past goes unrecognized, or perhaps the words sound pat, but there are other conditions of life that you do not perceive, sometimes because your time sequences are too different.  Before the smallest cell appeared, in your terms, there was the consciousness that formed the cell.

Words do nearly forsake me; the semantic differences are so vast.  If I say to you: “Life came from a dream”, such a statement sounds meaningless.  Yet as your physical reality personally is largely dependent upon your dreaming state, and impossible without it, so in the same way the first cell was physically materialized and actual only because of its own inner reality of consciousness.

In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter.  That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination – that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms.  It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible – and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.

There was no point at which consciousness was introduced, because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged.  That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence.  In your terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment.  In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.

As hinted, there have been all kinds of species of animal-man, and man-animal, of which your sciences are not aware, and bones found thought to form, say, a man and an animal that were from the same creature.  Afghanistan comes to mind here, as a particularly lucrative environment.

Your own kind of conscious mind is splendid and unique.  It causes you, however, to interpret all other kinds of life according to your own specifications and experience.  The complex nature of other animal consciousness escapes you completely.  And when you compare your technologies, learning, logical thought, cultures and arts with what you understand of animal experience, there seems no doubt that you are superior and “the Flower of Evolution” – that all other kinds of life are topped by your existence.

You are closed to the intricate, voluptuous, sensuous, social experience of the animals, or even of the plants – not being able to perceive that different kind of biological emotion and belonging, that rich, sensual identification with earth, and cut off from a biologically oriented culture that is everywhere part and parcel of both plant and animal life.

You are a part of that also, but the conscious mind, with its own specifications, cannot manipulate with that kind of knowledge.

There have also been men – in your terms – more developed than you – in your terms – for your ideas of development are highly erroneous.  But they topped you in technology, if that is your criterion.

I hesitate in many instances to say what I might, because it is so easy to misinterpret meanings; but when you ask what is the purpose of consciousness you take it for granted there must be one purpose – where the greater truth and creativity must be that consciousness itself cannot be aware of all of its own purposes, but ever discovers its own nature through its own manifestations.

To those who want easy answers, this is no answer, I admit.  There is, I know, in heroic terms a love, a knowledge, a compassion, a creativity that can be assigned to All That Is, which is within each creature.  I know that each smallest “particle” of consciousness can never be broke down, and that each contains an infinite capacity for creativity and development – and that each is innately blessed.

There is a design and a designer, but they are so combined, the one within and the one without, that it is impossible to separate them.  The Creator is also within its creations, and the creations themselves are gifted with creativity.

Session 795

Nature of the Psyche, Session 795

In their play children often imaginatively interchange their sexes.  The young selfhood is freer in its identification, and as yet has not been taught to identify its own personality with its sex exclusively.

In the dreams of children this same activity continues, so that the boy may have many dream experiences as a girl, and the girl as a boy.  More than this, however, in children’s dreams as in their play activity, age variances are also frequent.  The young child dreaming of its own future counterpart, for example, attains a kind of psychological projection into the future of its world.  Adults censor many of their own dreams so that the frequent changes in sexual orientation are not remembered.

EXERCISE

Play then at another game, and pretend that you are of the opposite sex.  Do this after an encounter in which the conventions of sex have played a part.  Ask yourself how many of your current beliefs would be different if your sex was.  If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

Your beliefs about dreams color your memory and interpretation of them, so that at the point of waking, with magnificent psychological duplicity, you often make last-minute adjustments that bring your dreams more in line with your conscious expectations.  The sexual symbols usually attached to dream images are highly simplistic, for example.  They program you to interpret dreams in a given manner.

You do have a “dream memory” as a species, with certain natural symbols.  These are individually experienced, with great variations.  The studies done on men and women dreamers are already prejudiced, however, both by the investigators and by the dreamers themselves.  Men remember “manly” dreams – generally speaking, now – while women in the same manner remember dreams that they believe suit their sex according to their beliefs.

People often program their waking memory in quite the same fashion.  The psyche, again, not only has no one sexual identification, but it is the larger psychic and psychological bank of potentials from which all gradations of sexuality emerge.  It is not asexual, and yet it is the combination of those richest ingredients considered to be male and female.

The human personality is therefore endowed sexually and psychologically with a freedom from strict sexual orientation.  This has contributed to the survival of the species by not separating any of its mental or psychological abilities into two opposite camps.  Except for the physical processes of reproduction, the species is free to arrange its psychological characteristics in whatever fashions it chooses.  There is no inner programming that says otherwise.

In dreams this psychological complexity is more apparent.  Because of programming, many people refrain from natural reactions of a most harmless nature, and these are often given expression in the dream state.  Those dreams, however, are precisely the ones least remembered – the censoring is so habitual.  The male’s aggressive tendencies, often taken as basic characteristics of the species itself, are a case in point.  This is an exaggerated, learned aggressive response, not natural in those terms in your species, or as interpreted in any other species.

This artificial aggressiveness has nothing to do either, basically, with the struggle for survival.  It is the direct result of the fact that the male has been taught to deny the existence within himself of certain basic emotions.  This means that he denies a certain portion of his own humanity, and then is forced to overreact in expressing those emotions left open to him.  The reasons for such a lopsided focus have been discussed at various times in my works.  The male, however, chose to take upon himself a kind of specialization of consciousness that, carried too far, leads to a hard over-objectivity.  Only in dreams in your time, in your society, is the male free to cry unabashedly, to admit any kind of dependency, and only at certain occasions and usually in relative privacy is he allowed to express feelings of love.

His rage turns outward as aggression.  It is the highest idiocy, however, to project that artificial aggression outward upon the animal kingdom in general.  Such beliefs invisibly affect all of your studies – and worse, they help you misread the activity in nature itself.

Those who imagine they look upon nature with the most objective of eyes are those whose subjective beliefs blind them most of all, for they cannot see through their own misinterpretations.  It has been said that statistics can be made to say two things at once, both contradictory; so the facts of nature can be read in completely different fashions as they are put together with the organizational abilities of the mind operating through the brain’s beliefs.  The exterior core of dreams is also blemished to that degree, but the inner core of dreams provides a constant new influx of material, feedback, and insight from the psyche, so that the personality is not at the mercy of its exterior experience only – not confined to environmental feedback only, but ever provided with fresh intuitive data and direction.

Even if such dreams are not recalled, they circulate through the psychological system, so to speak.  They are responsible for the inventiveness and creativity of the species, even bringing new comprehensions that can be used to bear upon the life of the physical world.

Again, as in your terms the species has a physical past, so it has a psychological past.  No experiences are ever lost.  The most private event is still written in the mass psyche of the species.

I am explaining this for now in terms of past, present, and future.  You can only understand some concepts when they are given in that fashion.  Taking that for granted, then, you are each born with the conscious knowledge of what has come before.  Your brain is far from an empty slate, waiting for the first imprint of experience; it is already equipped with complete “equations”, telling you who you are and where you have come from.  Nor do you wipe that slate clean, symbolically speaking, before you write your life upon it.  Instead, you draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of your ancestors, back – in your terms now – through time immemorial.

The individual is born equipped with his humanness, with certain propensities and leanings toward development.  He knows what human voices sound like even before his ear physically hears those sounds.  He is born wanting to form civilizations as, for example, beavers want to form dams.

Children’s dreams activate inner psychological mechanisms, and at a time when their age makes extensive physical knowledge of their world impossible.  In dreams they are given information regarding that environment.

Physical feedback is of course necessary for development, and a child deprived of it will not fully mature.  Yet the development of dreams follows inner patterns that activate the child’s growth, and stimulate its development.  There are even key dreams in infancy that serve to trigger necessary hormonal functioning.  The child crawls and walks in dreams before those acts are physically executed – the dreams serving as impetus for muscular coordination and development.

Language is practiced by infants in the dream state, and it is indeed that mental practice that results in children speaking sentences far more quickly than otherwise would seem possible.  The dream world, then, develops faster than physical experience.  For some time, the child is more secure there.  Without dreaming there would be no learning, nor would there be memory.

Events are processed in dreams, put in the necessary perspective, sorted and arranged.  This is done when the conscious mind is separated from direct involvement with physical events.  Dreams serve to dull the impact of the day’s events just past, while the meaning of those activities sifts through the various levels of the personality, settling into compartments of intent and belief.  Often the true impact of an event does not occur until it has been interpreted or re-experienced through a dream.

Because dreams follow paths of association, they break through time barriers, allowing the individual to mix, match, and compare events from different periods of his life.  All of this is done somewhat in the way that a child plays, through the formation of creative dream dramas in which the individual is free to play a million different roles and to examine the nature of probable events from the standpoint of “a game”.

In play, children adopt certain rules and conditions “for a time”.  The child can stop at any time.  Innumerable play events can occur with varying intensity, yet generally speaking the results cease when the game is over.  The child plays at being an adult, and is a child again when his parents call, so the effects of the game are not long-lasting.  Still, they are an important part of a child’s daily life, and they affect the way he or she relates to others.  So in dreams, the events have effects only while dreaming.  They do not practically intrude into waking hours – the attacking bear vanishes when you open your eyes; it does not physically chase you around the bedroom.

The great versatility of the species in its reaction to events is highly dependent upon this kind of dreaming capacity.  The species tries out its probable reactions to probable events in the dream state, and hence is better prepared for action “in the future”.

To some extent dreams are participated in by cellular consciousness also, for the cells have an equal interest in the individual’s psychic and body events.  In a way dreams are of course composite behavior – mental and psychic games that suite the purposes of mind and body alike.  Feedback from the physical environment may trigger an alarming dream that causes the individual to awaken.

Certain chemicals may affect dreaming by altering the cells’ reality.  Many sleeping pills are detrimental, in that they inhibit the body’s natural response to its environment while an individual is sleeping, and deaden the intimate relationship between the dreaming mind and the sleeping body.

Because you have very limited ideas of what logic is, it seems to you that the dreaming self is not critical, or “logical”, yet it works with amazing discrimination, sifting data, sending some to certain portions of the body, and structuring memory.  Sleeping pills also impede the critical functions of dreams that are so often overlooked.  The facts are that dreams involve high acts of creativity.  These are not only intuitively based, but formed with a logic far surpassing your ideas of that quality.  These creative acts are then fitted together through associative processes that come together most precisely to form the dream events.

It should certainly be obvious that dreams are not passive events.  Some rival physical events in intensity and even effect.  They involve quite active coordination on the part of mind and body, and they bring to the individual experience otherwise unattainable.

Small amounts of ordinary stimulators, such as coffee or tea, taken before bed when you are already sleepy, have a beneficial effect in stimulating dream activity and aiding dream recall.  Too large a serving, of course, could simply waken you, but small amounts taken if you are already drowsy allow you to take your conscious mind into the dream state more readily, where it can act as an observer.

A very small amount of alcohol can also serve.  Anything that suppresses activity will also suppress your dreams.  As is known, anyone deprived of sufficient dreaming will most likely begin to hallucinate while in the waking state, for too much experience has built up that needs processing.  There are many secondary hormonal activities that take place in the dream state and at no other time.  Even cellular growth and revitalization are accelerated while the body sleeps.

Session 794

Session 794

… your memories, feelings, and emotions, while connected to the body and while leaving traces, are separate.

It is as if the experiences of your life were captured on a film.  In this case the film would be the body tissue, the brain’s tissue.  The experiences themselves, however, would exist independently of the film, which in any case could not capture their entirety.

In a manner of speaking, the activity of your brain adjusts the speed with which you, as a physical creature, perceive life’s events.  Theoretically, those events could be slowed down or run at a quicker pace.  Again in a manner of speaking, the sound, vision, dimensional solidarity and so forth are “dubbed in”.  The picture runs at the same speed, more or less.  The physical senses chime in together to give you a dramatic sensual chorus, each “voice” keeping perfect time with all the other sensual patterns so that as a rule there is harmony and a sense of continuity, with no embarrassing lapses.

The same applies to your thoughts, which if you bother to listen seem to come smoothly one after another, more or less following the sequence of exterior activity.  The brain like the movie screen gives you a physical picture, in living stereo, of inner activities that nowhere themselves physically appear.

Your brain gives you a handy and quite necessary reference system with which to conduct corporal life.  It puts together for you in their “proper” sequences events that could be experienced in many other ways, using other kinds of organizations.  The brain, of course, and other portions of the body, tune into your planet and connect with the numberless time sequences – molecular, cellular, and so forth – so that they are synchronized with the world’s events.

The brain organizes activity and translates events, but it does not initiate them.  Events have an electromagnetic reality that is then projected onto the brain for physical activation.  Your instruments only pick up certain levels of the brain’s activity.  They do not perceive the mind’s activity at all, except as it is imprinted onto the brain.

Even dreams are so imprinted.  When one portion or one half of the brain is activated, for example, the corresponding portion of the other half is also activated, but at levels scientists do not perceive.  It is ridiculous to call one side or the other of the brain dominant, for the full richness of the entire earth experience requires utilization of both halves, as does dreaming.

In dreaming, however, the full sense-picture usually projected by the brain, and reinforced by bodily action, is not necessary.  Those dream experiences often seem out of joint or out of focus in morning’s hindsight, or in retrospect, simply because they occur with a complexity that the brain could not handle in ordinary waking terms.

The body obviously must react in your official present; hence the brain neatly keeps its physical time sequences with spaced neural responses.  The entire package of physical reality is dependent upon the senses’ data being timed – synchronized – giving the body an opportunity for precise action.  In dreams the senses are not so restrained.  Events from past, present, and future can be safely experienced, as can events that would be termed probable from your usual viewpoint, since the body, again, is not required to act upon them.

Because of the brain’s necessary specifications, large portions of your own greater reality cannot appear through its auspices.  The brain might consider such extracurricular activity as background noise or clutter that it could not decipher.  It is the mind, then, as the brain’s nonphysical counterpart, that decides what data will activate the brain in that regard.  The so-called ancient portions of the brain (e.g. limbic system) contain “the mind’s memories”.  Generally speaking, this means important data to which, however, no conscious attention need to be given.

None could be given, because the information deals with time scales that the more “sophisticated” portions of the brain can no longer handle.

The knowledge of the body’s own biological probabilities takes place at those ancient levels, and at those levels there is activity that results in a cellular communication existing between all species.  The brain has built-in powers of adaptation to an amazing degree, so that innately one portion can take over for any other portion, and perform its activities as well as its own.  Beliefs in what is possible and not possible often dull that faculty, however.  While the neural connections are specific, and while learned biological behavior dominates basically, the portions of the brain are innately inter-changeable, for they are directed by the mind’s action.

This is most difficult to explain, but the capacity for full conscious life is inherent in each portion of the body itself.  Otherwise, in fact, its smooth synchronicity would be impossible.  The brain has abilities you do not use consciously because your beliefs prevent you from initiating the proper neural habits.  Certain portions of the brain seem dominant only because of those neural habits that are adopted in any given civilization or time.  But other cultures in your past have experienced reality quite differently as a result of encouraging different neural patterns and putting experience together through other focuses.

Dreaming, for example, can be “brought into focus” in a far sharper fashion, so that at least some of those experiences can be consciously utilized.  When this happens, you are consciously taking advantage of experience that is physically and logically extracurricular.

You are bringing into your consciousness traces of events that have not been registered in the same way that waking events are by the brain.  The dream events are partially brain-recorded, but the brain separates such experience from waking events.  Dreams can provide you with experience that in a manner of speaking, at least, is not encountered in time.  The dream itself is recorded by the brain’s time sequences, but in the dream itself there is a duration of time “that is timeless”.

Theoretically, certain dreams can give you a lifetime’s experience to draw upon, though the dream itself can take less than an hour in your time.  In a way, dreams are the invisible thickness of your normal consciousness.  They involve both portions of the brain.  Many dreams do activate the brain in a ghostly fashion, sparking responses that are not practically pertinent in ordinary terms.  That is, they do not require direct action but serve as anticipators of action, reminders to the brain to initiate certain actions in its future.

Dreams are so many-leveled that a full discussion requires an almost impossible verbal expertise.  For while dreams do not necessitate action on the part of the whole body, and while the brain does not register the entire dream, the dream does serve to activate biological action – by releasing hormones, for example.

There are also what I will call body dreams.  No consciousness, to whatever degree, is fully manifested in matter.  There is always constant communication between all portions of the body, but when the conscious mind is diverted that activity often increases.  Cellular consciousness at its own level then forms a body dream.  These do not involve pictures or words, but are rather like the formations of electromagnetic intent, anticipating action to be taken, and these may then serve as initiators of therapeutic dreams, in which “higher” levels of consciousness are psychologically made aware of certain conditions.

Many problems, however, are anticipated through body dreams, and conditions cleared at that level alone.

While consciousness enjoys its physical orientation, it is also too creative to confine its activities in one direction.  Dreams provide consciousness with its own creative play, therefore, when it need not be so practical or so “mundane”, allowing it to use its innate characteristics more freely.

Many people are aware of double or triple dreams, when they seem to have two or three simultaneous dreams.  Usually upon the point of awakening, such dreams suddenly telescope into one that is predominant, with the others taking subordinate positions, though the dreamer is certain that in the moment before the dreams were equal in intensity.  Such dreams are representative of the great creativity of consciousness, and hint of its ability to carry on more than one line of experience at one time without losing track of itself.

In physical waking life, you must do one thing or another, generally speaking.  Obviously I am simplifying, since you can eat an orange, watch television, scratch your foot, and yell at the dog – all more or less at the same time.  You cannot, however, be in Boston and San Francisco at the same time, or be 21 years of age and 11 at the same time.

In double dreams and triple dreams consciousness shows its transparent, simultaneous nature.  Several lines of dream experience can be encountered at the same time, each complete in itself, but when the dreamer wakes to the fact, the experience cannot be neurologically transplanted; so one dream usually predominates, with the others more like ghost images.

There are too many varieties of such dreams to discuss here, but they all involve consciousness dispersing, yet retaining its identity, consciousness making loops within itself.  Such dreams involve other sequences than the ones with which you are familiar.  They hint at the true dimensions of consciousness that are usually unavailable to you, for you actually form your own historical world in the same manner, in that above all other experiences that one world is predominant, and played on the screen of your brain.

EXERCISE

Take a very simple event like the eating of an orange.  Playfully imagine how that event is interpreted by the cells of your body.  How is the orange perceived?  It might be directly felt by the tip of your finger, but are the cells in your feet aware of it?  Do the cells in your knee know you are eating an orange?

Take all the time you want with this.  Then explore your own conscious sense perceptions of the orange.  Dwell on its taste, texture, odor, shape.  Again, do this playfully, and take your time.  Then let your own associations flow in your mind.  What does the orange remind you of?  When did you first see or taste one?  Have you ever seen oranges grow, or orange blossoms?  What does the color remind you of?

Then pretend you are having a dream that begins with the image of an orange.  Follow the dream in your mind.  Next, pretend that you are waking from the dream to realize that another dream was simultaneously occurring, and ask yourself quickly what that dream was.  Followed in the same sequence given, the exercise will allow you to make loops with your own consciousness, so to speak, to catch it “coming and going”.  And the last question – what else were you dreaming of? – should bring an entirely new sequence of images and thoughts into your mind that were indeed happening at the same time as your daydream about the orange.

The feel and practice of these exercises are their important points – the manipulation of a creative consciousness.  You exist outside of your present context, but such statements are meaningless, practically speaking, unless you give yourself such freedom to experience events outside of that rigid framework.  These exercises alter your usual organizations, and hence allow you to encounter experience in a fresher fashion.

A double dream is like the double life lived by some people who have two families – one in each town – and who seemingly manipulate separate series of events that other people would find most confusing.  If the body can only follow certain sequences, still consciousness has inner depths of action that do not show on the surface line of experience.  Double dreams are clues to such activity.

While each person generally follows a given strand of consciousness, and identifies with it as “myself”, there are other alternate lines beneath the surface.  They are also quite as legitimately the same identity, but they are not focused upon because the body must have one clear, direct mode of action.

These strands are like double dreams that continue.  They also serve as a framework to the recognized self.  In periods of stress or challenge the recognized self may sense these other strains of consciousness, and realize that a fuller experience is possible, a greater psychological thickness.  On some occasions in the dream state the recognized self may then enlarge its perception enough to take advantage of these other portions of its own identity.  Double or triple dreams may represent such encounters at times.  Consciousness always seeks the riches, most creative form, while ever maintaining its own integrity.  The imagination, playing, the arts and dreaming, allow it to enrich its activities by providing feedback other than that received in the physical environment itself.