Session 782

Nature of the Psyche, Session 782

Your daily language deals with separations, divisions, and distinctions.  To some extent your language organizes your feelings and emotions.  The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.

In daily language, objects have certain names.  Obviously the names are not the objects, but symbols for them.  Even these symbols, however, divide you as the perceiver from the rest of the world, which becomes objectified.  You can yourself understand far more about the nature of the psyche, for example, than you think that you can.  To do this, however, you must leave your daily language behind at least momentarily, and pay attention to your own feelings and imaginations.  Your language tells you that certain things are true, or facts, and that certain things are not.  Many of your most vivid and moving feelings do not fit the facts of your language, so you disregard them.

These emotional experiences, however, often express the language of the psyche.  It is not that an understanding of your psyche is beyond you: It is usually that you try to understand or experience it in one of the most difficult ways – through the use of daily language.

The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche.  For this reason, it often gives experiences that conflict with the basic assumptions upon which daily language is based.  Therefore. the imagination is often considered suspect.

You might stand alone in your doorway, or in a field – or even on a street, surrounded by many people in a large city – look upward, suddenly struck by the great sweeping clouds above, and feel yourself a part of them.  You might momentarily experience a great yearning or feel your own emotions suddenly filled with that same moving majesty, so that for an instant you and the sky seem to be one.

Mundane language tells you, as you think with its patterns, that your imagination is running away with you, for obviously you are one thing and the sky is another.  You and sky do not equate – or as friend Spock would say: “It is not logical”.  The feeling swiftly fades after bemusing you briefly.  You might be spiritually refreshed, yet as a rule you would not consider the feeling to be a statement of any legitimate reality, or a representation of your psyche’s existence.

The emotions and the imagination, however, give you your closest contact with other portions of your own reality.  They also liberate your intellect so that its powers are not limited by concepts it has been taught are true.  Instead, such concepts are relatively true – operationally true.  For example, the physical laws that you are familiar with operate where you are.  They are true, relatively speaking.  In those terms you are one person physically objectified, staring upward in the scene just mentioned at an objectified sky.  You weigh so many pounds, tilt your head at such-and-such an angle to peer upward at the skyscape, and physically speaking, you can be categorized.

In those same terms the clouds could be physically measured, and shown to be so far above you – composed of, say, winds of a certain velocity, ready to pour down a precise amount of rain or whatever.  Physically speaking then, obviously, you are separate from the clouds, and so in those terms your momentary experience of uniting with them would seem to be a lie – at least not factual, or “the product of your imagination”.

Instead, such an event is a direct expression of the psyche’s knowledge.  It senses its quite legitimate identification with nature, exercises its mobility, and feels its own emotional power leap.  Your emotions in such a case would be momentarily magnified – raised, say, to a higher power.  There are multitudinous such examples that could be given, as in each day your psyche presents evidence of its own greater being – evidence that you are taught to overlook, or to dismiss because it is not factual.

What is imaginary is not true: You are taught this as children.  The imagination, however, brings you into connections with a different kind of truth, or a different framework in which experience can be legitimately perceived.  The larger truths of the psyche exist in that dimension.

From it you choose physical facts.  Thoughts are real.  Only some thoughts turn into physical actions, of course.  Despite distorted versions of that last statement, however, there is still obviously a distinct difference, say, between the thought of adultery and its physical expression.

You cannot treat thoughts and imagination in such a literal manner, nor in a large respect should you try to “guard your thoughts” as if they were herds of animals that you wanted to keep purely bred.  Your thoughts do form your reality.  If you do not fear them, however, they create their own balances.  The psyche dwells in a reality so different from the world you usually recognize that there good and evil, as you think of them, are also seen to be as operationally or relatively true as the difference between the perceiver and the object perceived.

Dreams, you have been taught, are imaginary events.

In larger terms it is futile to question whether or not dreams are true, for they simply are.  You do consider a dream true, however, if its events later occur in fact.

In the life of the psyche a dream is no more or less “true”, whether or not it is duplicated in waking life.  Dream events happen in a different context – one, you might say, of the imagination.  Here you experience a valid reality that exists on its own, so to speak; one in which the psyche’s own language is given greater freedom.

Some of you try to remember your dreams, but none of you have to relate to dream reality as you must to physical life.

To some extent, however, you form physical events while you are dreaming.  Then, freed from waking limitations, you process your experience, weigh it according to your own intents and purposes, correlate it with information so vast you could not be consciously aware of it.  In most dreams you do not simply think of a situation.  You imaginatively become part of it.  It is real in every fashion except that of physical fact.

When you meet with any fact, you encounter the tail end of a certain kind of creativity.  The psyche, however, is responsible for bringing facts into existence.  In that reality a so-called fact is equally true or equally false.  The dream that you remember is already a translation of a deeper experience.

It is cast for you so that it bridges the perception of the psyche and the perception of the dreaming self.  Dreams serve as dramas, transferring experience from one level of the psyche to another.  In certain portions of sleep, our experience reaches into areas of being so vast that the dream is used to translate it for you.

The power to dream springs from that source.  Dreaming is not a passive activity.  It demands a peculiar and distinctive mixture of various kinds of consciousness, and the transformation of “nonphysical perception” into symbols and codes that will be sensually understood, though not directly experienced as in waking experience.

You take dreaming for granted, yet it is the result of a characteristic ability that is responsible for the very subjective feeling that you call conscious life.  Without it your normal consciousness would not be possible.

A spoken language is, again, dependent upon all other languages that could possibly be spoken, and thus its sounds rise into prominence and order because of the silences and pauses between them; so your waking consciousness is dependent upon what you think of as sleeping or dreaming consciousness.  It rises into prominence in somewhat the same fashion, riding upon other possible versions of itself; alert only because – in your terms – of hidden pauses within its alertness.

The ability to dream presupposes the existence of experience that is not defined as physical fact.  It presupposes a far greater freedom in which perception is not dependent upon space or time, a reality in which objects appear or are dismissed with equal ease, a subjective framework in which the individual freely expresses what he or she will in the most direct of fashions, yet without physical contact in usual terms.

That reality represents your origin, and is the natural environment in which the psyche resides.  Your beliefs, cultural background, and to some extent your languages, set up barriers so that this dream dimension seems unreal to you.  Even when you catch yourselves in the most vivid of dream adventures, or find yourselves traveling outside of your bodies while dreaming, you still do not give such experiences equal validity with waking ones.

Subjectively speaking, you are everywhere surrounded by your own greater reality, but you do not look in the right places.  You have been taught not to trust your feelings, your dreams, or your imagination precisely because these do not often fit the accepted reality of facts.

They are the creators of facts, however.  In no way do I mean to demean the intellect.  It is here, however, that the tyranny of the fact world holds greatest sway.  The intellect has been denied its wings.  Its field of activity has been limited because you have given it only facts to go on.

Biologically, you are quite capable of dealing with dreaming and waking reality both, and of forming a far more effective synthesis in that regard.  All of your creative impulses arise from that hidden dimension – the very impulses that formed your greatest cities, your technology, and the physical cement that binds your culturally organized world.

The creative impulses are behind your languages, yet often you use the languages to silence rather than free inner communication.  There have always been rhythms in consciousness that are not historically obvious.  At certain times some behavior has been primarily expressed in the waking state, and sometimes in the dream state.  The emphasis is never static, but ever-changing.  In some periods, then, the normal behavior was “more dreamlike”, while more specific developments occurred in the dream state, which was then the more clear or specified of the two.  Men went to sleep to do their work, in other words, and the realm of dreams was considered more real than waking reality.  Now the opposite is true.