Session 783

Chapter 8: Dreams, Creativity, Languages, and “Cordellas”

Session 783

Though you may not realize it, you really manage your subjective lives in a rather circular fashion.  Pretend that the present moment is like a wheel, with your concentration at the hub.  To maintain what you think of as time momentum, the hub is connected by spokes to the exterior circular framework.  Otherwise the hub alone would get you nowhere, and your “moment” would not even give you a bumpy ride.

Your journey through time, however, seems to go smoothly: The wheel rolls ever forward.  It can roll backward as well, but in your intentness you have a forward direction in mind, and to go backward would seem to divert you from your purpose.

The forward motion brings you into the future, out of the past from which it seems you are emerging.  So you plot a straight course, it seems, through time, never realizing in our analogy that the wheel’s circular motion allows you to traverse this ongoing road.  The hub of the present, therefore, is held together by “spokes”.  These have nothing to do with your ideas of cause and effect at all.  Instead they refer to the circular motion of your own psyche as it seems to progress in time.  Each present moment of your experience is dependent upon the future as well as the past, your death as well as your birth.  Your birth and your death are built in, so to speak, together, one implied in the other.

You could not die unless you were the kind of creature who was born, nor could you have a present moment as you consider it.  Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth, and of its birth at its death, for all of its possibilities for action take place in the area between.  Death is therefore as creative as birth, and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms.

It is not quite that simple, however, for you live in the midst of multitudinous small deaths and births all of the time, that are registered by the body and the psyche.  Consciously you are usually unaware of them.  Logical thought, using usual definitions, deals with cause and effect, and depends upon a straight sequence of time for its framework.  It builds step upon step.  It is woven into your language.  According to logical thought and language you may say: “I am going to a party today because I was invited last week, and said I would attend”.  That makes sense.  You cannot say: “I am going to a party today because I am going to meet an individual there who will be very important to my life five years from now”.  That does not make sense in terms of logical thought or language, for in the last example cause and effect would exist simultaneously – or worse the effect would exist before the cause.

On all other-than-normally conscious levels, however, you deal very effectively with probabilities.  The cells maintain their integrity by choosing one probability above the others.  The present hub of the wheel, therefore, is but one prominent present, operationally valid.  Cause and effect as you think of them appear only because of the motion, the relative motion, of the wheel in our analogy.

When your eyes are on the road of time, therefore, you forget the circular motion of your being.  When you dream or sleep, however, the world of cause and effect either vanishes or appears confused and chaotic.  Normal daytime images are mixed and matched, so that combinations are formed quite different from those seen in the daylight.  The known rules that govern the behavior of creatures and objects in dreams seem no longer to apply.  Past, present, and future merge in a seemingly bizarre alliance in which, were you waking, you would lose all mental footing.  The circular nature of the psyche to some extent makes itself known.  When you think of dreams you usually consider those aspects of it only, commenting perhaps upon the strange activities, the odd juxtapositions and the strange character of dream life itself.  Few are struck by the fact of their dreams’ own order, or impressed by the ultimate restraint that allows such sometimes-spectacular events to occur in such a relatively restricted physical framework.

For example, in a dream of 20 minutes, events that would ordinarily take years can be experienced.  The body ages its 20 minutes of time, and that is all.  In dreams, experience is peripheral, in that it dips into your time and touches it, leaving ripples; but the dream events themselves exist largely out of time.  Dream experience is ordered in a circular fashion.  Sometimes it never touches the hub of your present moment at all, as you think of it, as far as your memory is concerned; yet the dream is, and it is registered at all other levels of your existence, including the cellular.

You always translate experience into terms you can understand.  Of course the translation is real.  The dreams as you recall it is already a translation, then, but an experienced one.  As a language that you know is, again, dependent upon other languages, and implied pauses and silences, so the dream that you experience and recall is also one statement of the psyche, coming into prominence; but it is also dependent upon other events that you do not recall, and that your consciousness, as it now operates, must automatically translate into its own terms.

On a physical level your body reacts to information about the environment with which you are not consciously concerned.  That same information is highly important to the body’s integrity, however, and therefore to your own mental stance.

On cellular levels the body has a picture not only of its own present condition, but of all those aspects of the physical environment that affect its own condition.  In its own codified fashion, it is not only aware of local weather conditions, for example, but of all those world patterns of weather upon which the local area is dependent.  It then prepares itself ahead of time to meet whatever challenges of adjustment will be necessary.  It weighs probabilities; it reacts to pressures of various kinds.

You are aware of pressure through touch, for instance, but in another version of that sense entirely, the cells react to air pressure.  The body knows to the most precise degree the measurements involving radiation of all kinds.  At one level, then, the body itself has a picture of reality of its own, upon which your conscious reality must be based – and yet the body’s terms of recognition or knowledge exist in terms so alien to your conscious ones as to be incomprehensible.  Your conscious order, therefore, rides upon this greater circular kind of knowledge.

Generally speaking, the psyche has the same kind of instant overall comprehension of psychological events and environments as your body has of physical ones.  It is then aware of your overall psychological climate locally, as it involves you personally, and in world terms.

Your actions take place with such seeming smoothness that you do not realize the order involved.  A volcanic eruption in one corner of the world will ultimately affect the entire earth in varying degrees.  An emotional eruption will do the same thing on another level, altering the local area primarily but also sending out its ripples into the mass psychological environment.  The psyche’s picture of reality, then, would be equally incomprehensible to the conscious mind because of the intense focus upon singularity that your usual consciousness requires.

Your dreams often give you glimpses, however, of the psyche’s picture of reality in that regard.

You become aware of probabilities, as actions sometimes that seem to have no connection with your own, but which are still related to them in that greater scheme of interaction that ordinarily you do not comprehend.

When you grow from a baby to an adult you do not just grow tall: You grow all about yourself, adding weight and thickness as well. To some extent events “grow” in the same fashion, and from the inside out, as you do.  In a dream you are closer to those stages in which events are born.  In your terms they emerge from the future and form the past, and are given vitality because of creative tension that exists between what you think of as your birth and your death.

You make sentences out of the alphabet of your language.  You speak these or write them, and use them to communicate.  Events can be considered in the same fashion, as psychological sentences put together from the alphabet of the senses – experienced sentences that are lived instead of written, formed into perceived history instead of just being penned, for example, into a book about history.

I said that your language to some extent programs your experience.  There is a language of the senses, however, that gives you biological perception, experience, and communication.  It forms the nature of the events that you can perceive.  It puts experience together so that it is physically felt.  All of your written or verbal languages have to be based upon this biological “alphabet”.  There is far greater leeway here than there is in any of your spoken or written languages.

I use the word “cordella” to express the source out of which such languages spring.  There are many correlations of course between your language and your body.  Your spoken language is dependent upon your breath, and even written language is dependent upon the rapidity with which messages can leap the nerved endings.  Biological cordellas then must be the source for physical languages, but the cordellas themselves arise from the psyche’s greater knowledge as it forms the physical mechanism to begin with.

Dreams are a language of the psyche, in which man’s nature merges in time and out of it.  He has sense experiences.  He runs, though he lies in bed.  He shouts, though no word is spoken.  He still has the language of the flesh, and yet that language is only opaquely connected with the body’s mechanisms.  He deals with events, yet they do not happen in his bedroom, or necessarily in any place that he can find upon awakening.