Session 779

Chapter 7: The Psyche, Languages, and Gods

Session 779

Almost any question that you can ask about God, with a capital, can be legitimately asked of the psyche as well.  It seems to you that you know yourself, but that you take the existence of your psyche on faith.  At best, it often seems that you are all that you know of your psyche, and you will complain that you do not know yourself to begin with.  When you say: “I want to find myself”, you usually take it for granted that there is a completed, done, finished version of yourself that you have mislaid somewhere.  When you think of finding God, you often think in the same terms.

Now you are “around yourself” all of the time.  You are ever becoming yourself.  In a manner of speaking you are “composed” of those patterns of yourself that are everywhere coming together.  You cannot help but be yourself.  Biologically, mentally, and spiritually you are marked as apart from all others, and no cloak of conventionality can ever hide that unutterable uniqueness.  You cannot help but be yourself, then.

In a way, physically you ae a molecular language that communicates to others, but a language with its own peculiarities, as if speaking an accepted tongue you spoke with a biological accent that carried its own flavor and meaning.

When you ask: “What is my psyche, or my soul, or who am I?” you are seeking of course for your own meaning as apart from what you already know about yourself.  In that context, God is as known and as unknown as you are to yourself.  Both God and the psyche are constantly expanding – unutterable, and always becoming.

You will question, most likely, “Becoming what?” for to you it usually seems that all motion tends toward a state of completion of one kind or another.  You think, therefore, in terms of becoming perfect, or becoming free.  The word “becoming” by itself seems to leave you up in the air, so to speak, suspended without definitions.  If I say: “You are becoming what you already are”, then my remark sounds meaningless, for if you already are, how can you become what is already accomplished?  In larger terms, however, what you are is always vaster than your knowledge of yourself, for in physical life you cannot keep up with your own psychological and psychic activity.

Again, in a way your bodies speak a biological language, but in those terms you are bilingual, to say the least.  You deal with certain kinds of organizations.  They can be equated with biological verbs, adjectives, and nouns.  These result in certain time sequences that can be compared to sentences, written and read from one side, say, to the other.

Pretend that your life’s experience is a page of a book that you write, read, and experience from top to bottom, left to right, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.  That is the you that you know – the world view that you understand.  But other quite as legitimate “yous” may write, read, and experience the same page backwards, or read each letter downward and back up again, as you would a column of figures.  Or others might mix and match the letters in entirely different fashions altogether, forming entirely different sentences.  Still another, vaster you might be aware of all of the different methods of experiencing that particular page, which is your life as you understand it.

You think that your own consciousness is the only logical culmination of your body’s reality.  You read yourself in a certain accepted fashion.  In the “entire book of life”, however, just physically speaking, there are interrelationships on adjacent levels that you do not perceive, as other portions of your own biological consciousness or biological language relate to the entire living fabric of the world.  In physical terms you are alive because of substructures – psychic, spiritual, and biological – of which you have hardly any comprehension at all.

These are implied, however, in the nature of your own consciousness, which could not exist otherwise as you know it.  As language gains and attains its meaning not only by what is included in it, but also by what is excluded, so your consciousness attains its stability also by exclusions.

What you are is implied in the nature of what you are not.  By the same token, you are what you are because of the existence of what you are not.

You read yourselves from the top of the page to the bottom, or from what you think of as the beginning to the end.  Your greater reality, however, is read in terms of intensities, so that the psyche puts you together in a different way.  The psyche does not mark time.  To it the intense experiences of your life exist simultaneously.  In your terms they would be the psyche’s present.  The psyche deals with probable events, however, so some events – perhaps some that you dreamed of but did not materialize – are quite real to the psyche.  They are far more real to it than most innocuous but definite physical events, as for example yesterday morning’s breakfast.

The inner events of the psyche compose the greater experience from which physical events arrive.  They cast an aura that almost magically makes your life your own.  Even if two people encountered precisely the same events in their lives at precisely the same time, their experiences of reality would still hardly be approximately connected.

Again, you read your own identities in a particular, specialized fashion.

Within your biological experience, however, plant, mineral, animal, and human consciousness intersect.  They encounter each other.  In the language of the self that you speak, these encounters are like the implied pauses in your verbal language.  These other kinds of consciousness then form inner rhythms upon which you superimpose your own.

These encounters of consciousness go on constantly.  They form their own kind of adjacent identities.  You would call them subspecies of consciousness, perhaps, but they are really identities that operate in a trans-species fashion.

If you “read yourselves” sideways in such a manner, you would discover portions of your own consciousness stretching out across the entire fabric of the earth as you understand it – becoming a part of the earth’s material, even as those materials become part of the self that you recognize.  Your consciousness would be far less hemmed in.  Time would expand adjacently.  You think of yourselves physically as “top dogs”, however, separate from the other species and kinds of life, so that in effect you limit your own experience of your psyche.

If you thought or felt in such a fashion, then you would appreciate the fact that biologically your body is yours by virtue of the mineral, plant and animal life from which it gains its sustenance.  You would not feel imprisoned as you often do within one corporal form, for you would understand that the body itself maintains its relative stability because of its constant give-and-take with the materials of the earth that are themselves possessed of consciousness.

You could to some extent feel your body coming together and dispersing constantly, and understand how you hover within it without fearing your own annihilation upon its dismantlement.

When you ask: “Who am I?” you are trying to read yourself as if you were a simple sentence already written.  Instead, you write yourself as you go along.  The sentence that you recognize is only one of many probable variations.  You and no other choose which experiences you want to actualize.  You do this as spontaneously as you speak words.  You take it for granted that a sentence begun will be finished.  You are in the midst of speaking yourself.  The speaking, which is your life, seems to happen by itself, since you are not aware of keeping yourself alive.  Your heart beats whether or not you understand anatomy.

You read yourself in too-narrow terms.  Much of the pain connected with serious illness and death results because you have no faith in your own continuing reality.  You fight pain because you have not learned to transcend it, or rather to use it.  You do not trust the natural consciousness of the body, so that when its end nears – and such an end is inevitable – you do not trust the signals that the body gives, that are meant to free you.

Certain kinds of pain automatically eject consciousness from the body.  Such pain cannot be verbalized, for it is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a tearing free, and it automatically brings about an almost exhilarating release of consciousness.  Such pain is also very brief.  Under your present system, however, drugs are usually administered, in which case pain is somewhat minimized, but prolonged – not triggering the natural release mechanisms.

If you read your selves adjacently, you would build up confidence in the body, and in those cooperative consciousnesses that form it.  You would have an intimate awareness of the body’s healing processes also.  You would not fear death as annihilation, and would feel your own consciousness gently disentangle itself from those others that so graciously couched it.