Session 791

Nature of the Psyche, Session 791

Pretend that you are a fine actor, playing in a multidimensional theater, so that each role you take attains a vitality far surpassing the creative powers of any ordinary play.

Each of you is embarked upon such an endeavor.  You lose yourselves in your parts.  You are also involved in a kind of creative dilemma, since in a manner of speaking you confuse yourself as the actor with the character you play so convincingly that you are fooled

You say: “I must maintain my individuality after death”, as if after the play the actor playing Hamlet stayed in that role, refused to study other parts or go on in his career, and said: “I am Hamlet, forever bound to follow the dilemmas and the challenges of my way.  I insist upon maintaining my individuality”.

In the dream state the actors become aware to some extent of the parts they play, and sense the true personal identity that is behind the artist’s craft.  I have spoken of this before, but it is important to remember that you impose a certain kind of “artificial” sense of exaggerated continuity even to the self you know.  Your experience changes constantly, and so does the intimate context of your life – but you concentrate upon points of order, in your terms, that actually serve to scale down the context of your experience to make it more comprehensible.  There are no such limits naturally set about your consciousness.

You have a mass psychological environment that forms your worldly culture, and corresponds to a worldly stage set in which experience then occurs.  Certain psychological conventions act as props.  There are, then, more or less formal psychological arrangements that are used as reference points, or settings.  You group your experience within those arrangements.  They serve to shape mental events as you physically perceive them.

The last sentence is important, for in your lifetimes your experience must be physically felt and interpreted.  Despite this, however, events spring from a nonphysical source.  As mentioned earlier, your recalled dreams are already interpretations of other nonphysical events.

Putting this as simply as possible, your actual experience is far too vast for you to physically follow.  Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of specialized focus within a particular area.  You imagine it to be “absolute”, in that it seems to involve an all-exclusive state that includes your identity as you think of it – only you give it boundaries like a kingdom.  It is, instead, a certain kind of organization that is indeed inviolate even while it is itself a portion of other kinds of consciousness, with their own points of focus.  Your body itself is composed of self-aware organizations of consciousness that escape your notice and deal with perceptual material utterly alien to your own ways.

There are affiliations of a most “sophisticated” fashion that leap even the boundaries of the species.  You look upon your cultural world with its art and manufacture, its cities, technology, and the cultivated use of the intellectual mind.  You count your religions, sciences, archaeologies, and triumphs over the environment, and it seems to you that no other consciousness has wrought what man’s has produced.  Those “products” of your consciousness are indeed unique, creative, and form a characteristic mosaic that has its own beauty and elegance.

There are organizations of consciousness, however, that leapfrog the species, that produce no arts or sciences per se – yet these together form the living body of the earth and the physical creatures thereon.  Their products are the seas upon which you sail your ships, the skies through which your airplanes fly, the land upon which your cities sprawl, and the very reality that makes your culture, or any culture, possible.

Man is a part of that trans-species consciousness also, as are the plants and animals.  Also, part of man’s reality contributes to that trans-species organization, but he has not chosen to focus his practical daily consciousness in that direction, or to identify his individuality with it.  As a result, he does not understand the greater natural mobility he himself possesses, nor can he practically perceive the natural psychological gestalts of which he is a part, that form all of your natural – meaning physical – world.

In dreams this relationship often is revealed.  The truth behind such relationships is inherent in all God-Man, God-Woman, Animal-Man, or Animal-Woman legends and mythology.  There are connections, then, between man and the animals and the so-called gods, that hint at psychological and natural realities.

Any section of the land has an identity, so to speak, and I am not talking symbolically.  Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm.  Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousness as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions.  In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama.  Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess.  It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity – stamped, as it were, with your identity.

Whether dispersed, concentrated in a tight grouping, appearing “alone” of flying through other larger swarms, that particular organization represents your identity.

Using an analogy, its “particles” could be dispersed throughout the universe, with galaxies between, yet the identity would be retained.  So unknowingly, now, portions of your consciousness mix and merge with those of other species without jarring your own sense of individuality one whit – yet forming other psychological realities upon which you do not concentrate.

In the dream state, animals, men, and plants merge their realities to some extent so that information belonging to one species is transferred to others in an inner communication and perception otherwise unknown in your world.

The natural structures of the earth are formed as the result of the biological cooperation of all species, and consciousness itself is independent of any of the forms that it may at one time or another assume.

Therefore, at levels that would appear chaotic to you, there is a great mixing and merging of consciousness, a continual exchange of information, so to speak; an open-ended exploration of possibilities, from which in your terms events privately and en masse emerge.

I am simply explaining the characteristics, aptitudes, abilities, and tendencies of Nature.  There are so many different levels in what you call the dream state that they are impossible to list, except in stereotyped ways.  This is particularly because some dream sequences involve biological comprehensions that are not literally translatable.

It has been truthfully said that the “unconscious” is intimately aware of the most minute details of your health, state of mind, and relationships.  “It” is also aware of the state of the earth’s health – even of the environmental conditions on the other side of the planet.  It is familiar with the cultural climate also.  Your recognized consciousness operates as it does because of immense information-gathering procedures – procedures that unite all species.  Biologically such information is coded, but that physical information, such as in the genes and chromosomes, can be altered through experience and mental activity in other species as well as your own.

On the one hand, dreaming on the part of animals – and men in particular – involves not only information processing, but information gathering.  Dreaming prevents life from becoming closed-ended by opening sources of information not practically available in the waking state, and by providing feedback from other than the conventional world.  Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity.  These [other consciousnesses] are dispersed in like manner.

In such ways each individual maintains a picture of the ever-changing physical and psychological mass environment.  Physical events as you understand them could not exist otherwise.  Basically, information is experience.  In dreams, you attain the necessary information to form your lives.  That state of sleep, therefore, is not simply the other side of your consciousness, but makes your waking life and culture possible.

Death operates in the same fashion.  The animals in particular realize this because they organize time differently from you.  Dreaming provides all the conditions of life and death, therefore – a fact that often frightens the waking self.  But here is a creative mixture: the perceptive organizations from which prosaically tuned conscious life emerges.  Here are the raw materials for all the daily events you recognize privately and on a world scale.

In nature nothing is wasted, so the luxurious growth of man’s dream landscapes is also utilized.  Whether or not these are physically actualized, they have their own reality.  Your own personalities are to some extent the result of your waking experience.  But they are also formed equally by your dreaming experience, by the learning and knowledge and encounters that occur when many would tell you that you are beyond legitimate perception.  Dreams, then, are deeply involved with the learning processes.  Dreams of walking and running occur in infants long before they crawl, and serve as impetuses.

In rudimentary form children’s dreams also involve mathematical concepts, so that formal mathematical training falls on already fertile grounds.  The arts, sciences, agriculture – all of these reflect natural contours and tendencies inherent in man’s mind, as general rather than specific attributes emerging first in the dream state, and then sparking specialized intellectual tendencies in the waking state.

Cities, therefore, exist in dreams before the time of tribes.  The dream state provides the impetus for growth, and opens up to the earth-tuned consciousness avenues of information for its physical survival.

Because that state is also connected with waking life, you also take into it many of the elements of your daily existence, so that your recalled dreams are often cast in fairly conventional terms.  As a rule, you remember the dream’s outer veneer, or what it turns into as you approach your usual level of consciousness.  In a dream you are basically aware of so many facets of an event that many of them must necessarily escape your waking memory.  Yet any real education must take into consideration the learning processes within dreams, and no one can hope to glimpse the nature of the psyche without encouraging dream experience, recall, and the creative use of dream education in waking life.