Personal Reality, Session 786
You recognize that earth has an
atmosphere. In your limited space travel
you take for granted the fact that different conditions will be met from those
encountered upon your planet.
There are alterations taken into your
calculations, so astronauts know ahead of time that they can expect to
encounter weightlessness, for example.
Your ideas and experiences with space and matter, however, are
determined by your own sense apparatus.
What is matter to you might be “empty space” for beings equipped in an
entirely different fashion. Your
conscious mind as you understand it is the “psychological structure” that deals
with conditions on a physical basis.
Sense data are served up, so to speak, more or less already
packaged. The greater inner reality of
the psyche, however, is as extensive as outer space seems to be.
When information “falls” into your
conscious mind from those vaster areas, then it also is changed as it travels
through various levels of psychological atmosphere, until it finally lands or
explodes in a series of images or thoughts.
You are bombarded with such “alien intrusions”
constantly. The focus of your consciousness
blots these out while you are in the normal waking state. There are falling stars everywhere tumbling
through the heavens, for example, though you only see some of these in the
night sky. It is important during the
day that a screening process be used, so that the precision of your actions can
be maintained. Again, however, that fine
precision rests upon an endless amount of information that impinges onto other
levels of your psychological reality. These
data then become the raw material, so to speak, from which your physical events
are formed.
In the dream state, with your body more or
less safe and at rest, and without the necessity for precise action, these
psychological intrusions become more apparent.
Many of your dreams are like the tail end of a comet: Their real life is
over, and you see the flash of their disappearance as they strike your own
mental atmosphere and explode in a spark of dream images. They are transformed, therefore, as they
travel through your own psychological atmosphere. You could not perceive them in your own state
– nor can they maintain their native state as they plunge through the far
reaches of the psyche. They fall in
patterns, forming themselves naturally into the dream contents that fit the
contours of your own mind. The resulting
structure of the dream suits your reality and no other: As this intrusive
matter falls, plummets, or shifts through the levels of your own psychological
atmosphere, it is transformed by the conditions it meets.
Raindrop patterns in a puddle follow
certain laws having to do with the contours of the land, the weather, the
nature of the rain, of the clouds, the height from which the raindrops fall,
and the conditions operating in the nearby and far portions of the world. If you could properly understand all of that,
then by looking into a single puddle you could tell the past and present
weather conditions for the entire planet, and follow the probabilities in terms
of storms, or volcanic eruptions. You
cannot do this, of course, yet it is possible.
Dreams patter down into the psychological
puddles. They follow the contours of
your psychological reality. They make
ever-moving psychic patterns in your mind, rippling outward. The rain that hits your backyard as warm
drops, soft and clear, may be hail in areas far above your rooftop, but it
changes its form as it falls – again, according to the conditions that it
encounters. So these “alien intrusions”
do the same, and the dreams are like the raindrops, for at other “higher”
levels they may have quite a different form indeed.
There are gullies, hills, mountains,
valleys, large continents, small islands upon the earth, and the falling rain
fits itself to those contours. Your own
thoughts, dreams, intents, emotions, beliefs – these are the natural features
of your mind, so that information, impinging upon your mental world, also
follows those contours.
If there is a gully in your backyard, it
will always collect the rain that falls.
Your beliefs are like receptive areas – open basins – that you use to
collect information. Intrusive data will
often fall into such basins, taking on their contours, of course. Beliefs are ways of structuring reality. If you over-structure reality, however, then
you will end up with a formal mental garden – whose precise display may be so
rigidly structured that the natural aspect of the plants and the flowers is
completely obscured. Even your dream
information, then, will flow into structured patterns.
You know that the natural world changes its
form constantly. Objects, however,
follow certain laws of a physical nature as you experience them, just as
violets on the ground do not suddenly change into rocks.
These conditions, however, only exist at
the conscious level of your perception.
The larger psyche deals with the greater dimension of events, and the
dream state itself is like a laboratory in which your waking reality is
constructed. The physical earth is
bombarded by cosmic rays, and by other phenomena that you do not perceive, yet
they are highly important to your survival.
The psyche is bombarded in the same way by phenomena important to your
survival. In the laboratory of dreams
this information is processed, collected, and finally formed into the dreams
that you may or may not remember; dreams that are already translations of other
events, shaped into forms that you recognize.
Each dream you remember is quite legitimate
in the form in which you recall it, for the information has broken down, so to
speak, fitting the contours of your own intents and purposes. But such a dream is also a symbol for another
unrecalled event, a consciously unrecorded “falling star”, and a clue as to how
any environment is formed.
In a manner of speaking, dream reality is
closer to the true nature of events than your experience with physical events
leads you to suppose.
Dreams often seem chaotic because your
point of reference is too small to contain the added dimensions of
actuality. Again, in a manner of
speaking, events are far more circular in nature. In dreams you can experience the past or
future. Physical events are actually
formed now, in your terms, because of the interactions between past and
future, which are not separate in actuality, but only in your perception.
A dream is like the snap of a rubber band,
but it is not the rubber band. You read
newspapers and keep in constant physical communication with others of your
kind. The news affects “future” events. Individuals and governments take such communications
into consideration when they make their decisions. The newspapers are not the events they
discuss, though they are their own kind of events. The written news story is actually composed
of a group of symbols. Through reading
you learn how to interpret these. If you
watch news on television you have a larger view of a given news event. When you are viewing a war in a newscast,
however, you are still not watching people die.
You are watching symbols translated into images that are then visually
perceived. The images stand for the
people, but they are not the people. The
symbols carry the message, but they are not the event they depict.
Some of your dreams are like newspaper
stories, informing you of events that have happened in other portions of the
psyche. Others are like the televised
news picture, carrying perhaps more information about the event but still not containing
it.
Psychologically and physically, however,
you send out dream bulletins all the while in a constant inner
communication. On this level individual
dreams help form mass reality, yet also to some extent arise from it in the
same way that local weather conditions contribute to world weather conditions,
while they are formed by them at the same time.
Your earth exists in the context of the
physical universe. You exist in the
context of your psyche. The events that
you recognize as real are dependent upon all of the other events occurring
within your psyche, even as the existence of the earth is dependent upon the
other aspects of the physical universe.
Events as you understand them are only
intrusions of multidimensional activities into space and time. Events are reflections of your dreams even as
your dreams reflect the events you know; those you experienced, and those you
anticipate in one way or another. In a
manner of speaking, then, and without denying the great validity of your
experience, events as you know them are but fragments of other happenings in
which you are also intimately involved.
The inner multidimensional shape of events occurs in a framework that
you cannot structure, however, because as a rule you are not focused in that direction. You prefer to deal with activities that can
be physically manipulated.
The physical manipulation of events is
indeed a psychological knack of considerable merit, in which consciousness and
attention are exuberantly and wholeheartedly focused, bringing vitality and
meaning to one relatively small rang of activity.
Again, I do not mean to deny the validity
of that experience, but to point out its specialized nature. By its nature, however, that precise specialization
and tuning of consciousness in to space and time largely precludes other
less-specialized encounters with realities.
Dreams often present you with what seems to be an ambiguity, an
opaqueness, since they lack the immediate impact of psychological activity with
space and time. From your viewpoint it
seems often that dreams are not events, or that they happen but do not
happen. The lack of normal time and space
intersections means that you cannot share your dreams with others in the way
that you can share waking events. Nor can
you remember dream events – or so it seems – as you do your normal conscious
experience. In actual fact you remember
consciously only certain highlighted events of your lives, and ordinary details
of your days vanish as dreams seem to.
You have a dream memory, of course, though
you are not aware of it as a rule. There
is a craft involved in the formation of events.
You perform this craft well when dreaming. Event-making begins before your birth, and
the dreams of unborn children and their mothers often merge. The dreams of those about to die often
involve dream structures that already prepare them for future existence. In fact, towards death a great dream
acceleration is involved as new probabilities are considered – a dream
acceleration that provides psychic impetus for new birth.
Some of this is most difficult to explain,
yet it is true to say that no event has a beginning or ending.
This is true of a life. It is true of a dream. The information is not practical in your
terms, because it denies your direct experience. Upon request, however, and with some
practice, you can suggest in the middle of a dream that it expand to its larger
proportions. You would then experience
one dream wrapped in another, or several occurring at one time – all involving
aspects of a particular theme or probability, with each connected to the
others, although to you the connections might not be apparent.
Each event of your life is contained within
each other event. In the same way, each
lifetime is contained in each other lifetime.
The feeling of reality is “truer” then in the dream state. You can become consciously aware of your
dreams to some extent – that is, consciously aware of your own dreaming. You can also allow your “dream self” greater
expression in the waking state. This can
be done through techniques that are largely connected with creativity.
Creativity connects waking and dreaming
reality, and is in itself a threshold in which the waking and dreaming selves
merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality. You cannot begin to understand how you form
the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between
creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. In one respect dreams are a kind of
structured unconscious play. Your mind
dreams in joyful pleasure at using itself, freed from the concerns of practical
living. Dreams are the mind’s free
play. The spontaneous activity, however,
is at the same time training in the art of forming practical events.
Probabilities can be juggled, tried out
without physical consequences. The mind
follows its natural bents. It has far
more energy than you allow it to use, and it releases this in great “fantasies”
– fantasies from which you will choose facts that you will experience. At the same time dreaming is an art of the
highest nature, in which all are proficient.
There are structured dreams as there are structured games in waking
life. There are mass dreams “attended by
many”. There are themes, both mass and
private, that serve as a basis or framework.
Yet overall, the mind’s spontaneous activity continues because it enjoys
its own activities.
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