Session 796

Chapter 11: The Universe and the Psyche

Session 796

(The first half of this session came through because of a dream Jane had last night, and interpreted on her own today …)

It is often not enough – in fact, seldom enough – that deep emotional fears simply be realized once or twice.  They must be encountered more or less directly.  Otherwise the old habits allow such fears to be buried again.

So Ruburt’s dream made possible a conscious emotional realization of fear – but more, it provided for that fear’s release, or gave the solution to a deep emotional equation.  In this case it was the realization emotionally that life is not given by the parent, but through the parent – by LIFE itself, or All That Is, and “with no strings attached”.

The second part of the dream, the solution, had not come consciously and emotionally to Ruburt before.  Intellectually he had the solution, but it did not become part of the emotional equation until the dream put the two together.  You cannot logically, mathematically explain such emotional reality.

On some occasions long-term illnesses, for instance, are resolved suddenly through a dream.  However, in most cases dreams prevent such chronic illnesses, providing through small therapeutics a constant series of minor but important personal revelations.

That is, dreams are the best preventive medicine.  Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding.  Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind.  As the body handles many physical manipulations without your own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of your own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which you are not aware.

You could not physically handle anything like complete dream recall.  You are not consciously capable of dealing with the psychological depths and riches that activity reveals.  For one thing, your concepts of time, realistically or practically speaking, as utilized, would become more difficult to maintain in normal life.  This does not mean that far greater dream recall than you have is not to your advantage, because it certainly is.  I merely want to explain why so many dreams are not recalled.

While the large proportion remain relatively hidden, however, the average person often meets with dream fragments just below the normal threshold of consciousness – not recognizing them as what they are – experiencing instead the impulse to do this or that on a given day; to eat this or that, or to refrain from something else.  An easy enough example is the case where an individual with no memory [of such a dream] decides to cancel a plane trip on a given day, and later discovers that the plane crashed.  The impulse to cancel may or may not seem to have an acceptable, rational explanation; that is, for no seeming reason, the individual may simply, impulsively, feel a premonition.  On the other hand, the impulse might appear as a normal, logical change of plan.

We are taking it for granted that a forgotten dream stated the probable catastrophe.  This information was unconsciously processed, the probability considered and rejected: Psychologically or physically, the person was not ready to die.  Others with the same knowledge found that death was the accepted probability.  This does not mean that any of those people could bear consciously knowing their own decisions – or could board the plane with the conscious consequences in mind.

Nor is such an inner decision forced upon the conscious personality, for in all such instances, the conscious personality has at various times come close to accepting the idea of death at the particular time in life.

This does not mean that those people are committing suicide in the same way that a person does who takes his own life – but that in a unique psychological manipulation they no longer hold the same claim to life as they had before.  They “throw their lives to the Fates”, so to speak, saying not as they did before: “I will live”, but: “I will live or die as the Fates decide”.

They may use other terms than Fate, of course, but the vital, personal, direct, affirmative intent to live is not there.  They are headed for another reality, and ready for it.

The conscious mind, however, can only hold so much.  Life as you know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms.  The sweet parcel of physical existence, I have told you, exists as much by merit of what it does not include as it does by merit of your experience.  In important ways your dreams make your life possible by ordering your psychological life automatically, as your physical body is ordered automatically for you.  You can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree.  But you cannot become completely aware of your dreams in their entirety, and maintain your normal physical stance.

As a civilization you fail to reap dreams’ greater benefit, and the conscious mind is able to handle much more dream recall than you allow.  Such training would add immeasurably to the dimensions of your life.  Dreams educate you even in spatial relationships, and are far more related to the organism’s stance in the environment than is realized.  The child learns spatial relationships in dreams.

Ruburt had to know what he was afraid of, and his dream interpretation gave him that knowledge so that he could deal with it.  It was the fear of death – not chosen, of course – the fear that if he did not deliver, work hard, and pay his mother back for a life magically given, grudgingly given, then in a magical equation she, the mother, could take it back.  But the mother did not give the life.  The life came from All That Is, from the spirit of life itself, and was freely given – to be taken away by no one, or threatened by no one or no force, until that life fulfills its own purposes and decides to travel on.

Ruburt did feel that it was not safe to let go, lest relaxation mean death.  Life is expression.  It comes to be out of the force of itself, and no force stands against it or threatens it.  Death in your terms certainly seems an end, but it is instead a translation of life into another form.

This leads me rather naturally to my next topic.

First of all, there are verbal difficulties having to do with the definition of life.  It appears that there is living matter and nonliving matter, leading to such questions as: “How does nonliving matter become living?”

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter.  There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have ascribed to life, or living conditions – a point that meets the requirements that you have arbitrarily set.

This makes it highly difficult in a discussion, however, for there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter.  There is no point at which consciousness emerged.  Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions you call living.

If we must speak in terms of continuity, which I regret, then in those terms you could say that life in the physical universe, on your planet, “began” spontaneously in a given number of species at the same time.

There were fully developed men – that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will – living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors.  Species have come and gone of which you have no knowledge.  There are parallel developments.  That is, there were “apes” who attained their own “civilizations”, for example.  They used tools.  There were not men-to-be, nor did they evolve into men.

It is erroneous to say that they did not develop, or that their progress was stunted, for it was not.  Their reality explored the ramifications of animalhood in a completely different fashion.  Their development paralleled man’s in many respects, in that they lived simultaneously upon the earth, and shared the environment.

I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man did learn from them.  The impact of many of my statements of the past goes unrecognized, or perhaps the words sound pat, but there are other conditions of life that you do not perceive, sometimes because your time sequences are too different.  Before the smallest cell appeared, in your terms, there was the consciousness that formed the cell.

Words do nearly forsake me; the semantic differences are so vast.  If I say to you: “Life came from a dream”, such a statement sounds meaningless.  Yet as your physical reality personally is largely dependent upon your dreaming state, and impossible without it, so in the same way the first cell was physically materialized and actual only because of its own inner reality of consciousness.

In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter.  That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination – that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms.  It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible – and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.

There was no point at which consciousness was introduced, because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged.  That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence.  In your terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment.  In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.

As hinted, there have been all kinds of species of animal-man, and man-animal, of which your sciences are not aware, and bones found thought to form, say, a man and an animal that were from the same creature.  Afghanistan comes to mind here, as a particularly lucrative environment.

Your own kind of conscious mind is splendid and unique.  It causes you, however, to interpret all other kinds of life according to your own specifications and experience.  The complex nature of other animal consciousness escapes you completely.  And when you compare your technologies, learning, logical thought, cultures and arts with what you understand of animal experience, there seems no doubt that you are superior and “the Flower of Evolution” – that all other kinds of life are topped by your existence.

You are closed to the intricate, voluptuous, sensuous, social experience of the animals, or even of the plants – not being able to perceive that different kind of biological emotion and belonging, that rich, sensual identification with earth, and cut off from a biologically oriented culture that is everywhere part and parcel of both plant and animal life.

You are a part of that also, but the conscious mind, with its own specifications, cannot manipulate with that kind of knowledge.

There have also been men – in your terms – more developed than you – in your terms – for your ideas of development are highly erroneous.  But they topped you in technology, if that is your criterion.

I hesitate in many instances to say what I might, because it is so easy to misinterpret meanings; but when you ask what is the purpose of consciousness you take it for granted there must be one purpose – where the greater truth and creativity must be that consciousness itself cannot be aware of all of its own purposes, but ever discovers its own nature through its own manifestations.

To those who want easy answers, this is no answer, I admit.  There is, I know, in heroic terms a love, a knowledge, a compassion, a creativity that can be assigned to All That Is, which is within each creature.  I know that each smallest “particle” of consciousness can never be broke down, and that each contains an infinite capacity for creativity and development – and that each is innately blessed.

There is a design and a designer, but they are so combined, the one within and the one without, that it is impossible to separate them.  The Creator is also within its creations, and the creations themselves are gifted with creativity.