Session 794

Session 794

… your memories, feelings, and emotions, while connected to the body and while leaving traces, are separate.

It is as if the experiences of your life were captured on a film.  In this case the film would be the body tissue, the brain’s tissue.  The experiences themselves, however, would exist independently of the film, which in any case could not capture their entirety.

In a manner of speaking, the activity of your brain adjusts the speed with which you, as a physical creature, perceive life’s events.  Theoretically, those events could be slowed down or run at a quicker pace.  Again in a manner of speaking, the sound, vision, dimensional solidarity and so forth are “dubbed in”.  The picture runs at the same speed, more or less.  The physical senses chime in together to give you a dramatic sensual chorus, each “voice” keeping perfect time with all the other sensual patterns so that as a rule there is harmony and a sense of continuity, with no embarrassing lapses.

The same applies to your thoughts, which if you bother to listen seem to come smoothly one after another, more or less following the sequence of exterior activity.  The brain like the movie screen gives you a physical picture, in living stereo, of inner activities that nowhere themselves physically appear.

Your brain gives you a handy and quite necessary reference system with which to conduct corporal life.  It puts together for you in their “proper” sequences events that could be experienced in many other ways, using other kinds of organizations.  The brain, of course, and other portions of the body, tune into your planet and connect with the numberless time sequences – molecular, cellular, and so forth – so that they are synchronized with the world’s events.

The brain organizes activity and translates events, but it does not initiate them.  Events have an electromagnetic reality that is then projected onto the brain for physical activation.  Your instruments only pick up certain levels of the brain’s activity.  They do not perceive the mind’s activity at all, except as it is imprinted onto the brain.

Even dreams are so imprinted.  When one portion or one half of the brain is activated, for example, the corresponding portion of the other half is also activated, but at levels scientists do not perceive.  It is ridiculous to call one side or the other of the brain dominant, for the full richness of the entire earth experience requires utilization of both halves, as does dreaming.

In dreaming, however, the full sense-picture usually projected by the brain, and reinforced by bodily action, is not necessary.  Those dream experiences often seem out of joint or out of focus in morning’s hindsight, or in retrospect, simply because they occur with a complexity that the brain could not handle in ordinary waking terms.

The body obviously must react in your official present; hence the brain neatly keeps its physical time sequences with spaced neural responses.  The entire package of physical reality is dependent upon the senses’ data being timed – synchronized – giving the body an opportunity for precise action.  In dreams the senses are not so restrained.  Events from past, present, and future can be safely experienced, as can events that would be termed probable from your usual viewpoint, since the body, again, is not required to act upon them.

Because of the brain’s necessary specifications, large portions of your own greater reality cannot appear through its auspices.  The brain might consider such extracurricular activity as background noise or clutter that it could not decipher.  It is the mind, then, as the brain’s nonphysical counterpart, that decides what data will activate the brain in that regard.  The so-called ancient portions of the brain (e.g. limbic system) contain “the mind’s memories”.  Generally speaking, this means important data to which, however, no conscious attention need to be given.

None could be given, because the information deals with time scales that the more “sophisticated” portions of the brain can no longer handle.

The knowledge of the body’s own biological probabilities takes place at those ancient levels, and at those levels there is activity that results in a cellular communication existing between all species.  The brain has built-in powers of adaptation to an amazing degree, so that innately one portion can take over for any other portion, and perform its activities as well as its own.  Beliefs in what is possible and not possible often dull that faculty, however.  While the neural connections are specific, and while learned biological behavior dominates basically, the portions of the brain are innately inter-changeable, for they are directed by the mind’s action.

This is most difficult to explain, but the capacity for full conscious life is inherent in each portion of the body itself.  Otherwise, in fact, its smooth synchronicity would be impossible.  The brain has abilities you do not use consciously because your beliefs prevent you from initiating the proper neural habits.  Certain portions of the brain seem dominant only because of those neural habits that are adopted in any given civilization or time.  But other cultures in your past have experienced reality quite differently as a result of encouraging different neural patterns and putting experience together through other focuses.

Dreaming, for example, can be “brought into focus” in a far sharper fashion, so that at least some of those experiences can be consciously utilized.  When this happens, you are consciously taking advantage of experience that is physically and logically extracurricular.

You are bringing into your consciousness traces of events that have not been registered in the same way that waking events are by the brain.  The dream events are partially brain-recorded, but the brain separates such experience from waking events.  Dreams can provide you with experience that in a manner of speaking, at least, is not encountered in time.  The dream itself is recorded by the brain’s time sequences, but in the dream itself there is a duration of time “that is timeless”.

Theoretically, certain dreams can give you a lifetime’s experience to draw upon, though the dream itself can take less than an hour in your time.  In a way, dreams are the invisible thickness of your normal consciousness.  They involve both portions of the brain.  Many dreams do activate the brain in a ghostly fashion, sparking responses that are not practically pertinent in ordinary terms.  That is, they do not require direct action but serve as anticipators of action, reminders to the brain to initiate certain actions in its future.

Dreams are so many-leveled that a full discussion requires an almost impossible verbal expertise.  For while dreams do not necessitate action on the part of the whole body, and while the brain does not register the entire dream, the dream does serve to activate biological action – by releasing hormones, for example.

There are also what I will call body dreams.  No consciousness, to whatever degree, is fully manifested in matter.  There is always constant communication between all portions of the body, but when the conscious mind is diverted that activity often increases.  Cellular consciousness at its own level then forms a body dream.  These do not involve pictures or words, but are rather like the formations of electromagnetic intent, anticipating action to be taken, and these may then serve as initiators of therapeutic dreams, in which “higher” levels of consciousness are psychologically made aware of certain conditions.

Many problems, however, are anticipated through body dreams, and conditions cleared at that level alone.

While consciousness enjoys its physical orientation, it is also too creative to confine its activities in one direction.  Dreams provide consciousness with its own creative play, therefore, when it need not be so practical or so “mundane”, allowing it to use its innate characteristics more freely.

Many people are aware of double or triple dreams, when they seem to have two or three simultaneous dreams.  Usually upon the point of awakening, such dreams suddenly telescope into one that is predominant, with the others taking subordinate positions, though the dreamer is certain that in the moment before the dreams were equal in intensity.  Such dreams are representative of the great creativity of consciousness, and hint of its ability to carry on more than one line of experience at one time without losing track of itself.

In physical waking life, you must do one thing or another, generally speaking.  Obviously I am simplifying, since you can eat an orange, watch television, scratch your foot, and yell at the dog – all more or less at the same time.  You cannot, however, be in Boston and San Francisco at the same time, or be 21 years of age and 11 at the same time.

In double dreams and triple dreams consciousness shows its transparent, simultaneous nature.  Several lines of dream experience can be encountered at the same time, each complete in itself, but when the dreamer wakes to the fact, the experience cannot be neurologically transplanted; so one dream usually predominates, with the others more like ghost images.

There are too many varieties of such dreams to discuss here, but they all involve consciousness dispersing, yet retaining its identity, consciousness making loops within itself.  Such dreams involve other sequences than the ones with which you are familiar.  They hint at the true dimensions of consciousness that are usually unavailable to you, for you actually form your own historical world in the same manner, in that above all other experiences that one world is predominant, and played on the screen of your brain.

EXERCISE

Take a very simple event like the eating of an orange.  Playfully imagine how that event is interpreted by the cells of your body.  How is the orange perceived?  It might be directly felt by the tip of your finger, but are the cells in your feet aware of it?  Do the cells in your knee know you are eating an orange?

Take all the time you want with this.  Then explore your own conscious sense perceptions of the orange.  Dwell on its taste, texture, odor, shape.  Again, do this playfully, and take your time.  Then let your own associations flow in your mind.  What does the orange remind you of?  When did you first see or taste one?  Have you ever seen oranges grow, or orange blossoms?  What does the color remind you of?

Then pretend you are having a dream that begins with the image of an orange.  Follow the dream in your mind.  Next, pretend that you are waking from the dream to realize that another dream was simultaneously occurring, and ask yourself quickly what that dream was.  Followed in the same sequence given, the exercise will allow you to make loops with your own consciousness, so to speak, to catch it “coming and going”.  And the last question – what else were you dreaming of? – should bring an entirely new sequence of images and thoughts into your mind that were indeed happening at the same time as your daydream about the orange.

The feel and practice of these exercises are their important points – the manipulation of a creative consciousness.  You exist outside of your present context, but such statements are meaningless, practically speaking, unless you give yourself such freedom to experience events outside of that rigid framework.  These exercises alter your usual organizations, and hence allow you to encounter experience in a fresher fashion.

A double dream is like the double life lived by some people who have two families – one in each town – and who seemingly manipulate separate series of events that other people would find most confusing.  If the body can only follow certain sequences, still consciousness has inner depths of action that do not show on the surface line of experience.  Double dreams are clues to such activity.

While each person generally follows a given strand of consciousness, and identifies with it as “myself”, there are other alternate lines beneath the surface.  They are also quite as legitimately the same identity, but they are not focused upon because the body must have one clear, direct mode of action.

These strands are like double dreams that continue.  They also serve as a framework to the recognized self.  In periods of stress or challenge the recognized self may sense these other strains of consciousness, and realize that a fuller experience is possible, a greater psychological thickness.  On some occasions in the dream state the recognized self may then enlarge its perception enough to take advantage of these other portions of its own identity.  Double or triple dreams may represent such encounters at times.  Consciousness always seeks the riches, most creative form, while ever maintaining its own integrity.  The imagination, playing, the arts and dreaming, allow it to enrich its activities by providing feedback other than that received in the physical environment itself.