Session 798

Nature of the Psyche Session 798

Your next question is easy to anticipate, of course, for you will want to know the origin of that “interior” universe from which I have said the exterior one ever emerges – and here we must part company with treasured objectivity, and enter instead a mental domain, in which it is seen that contradictions are not errors; an inner domain large enough to contain contradictions at one level, for at another level they are seen to be no contradictions at all.

In science as it stands, it is necessary that self-contradictions do not arise.  If a hypothesis is “proven true”, then it cannot be proven false – or, of course, it was never true to begin with.

In those terms, therefore, the universe either had “a Creator”, or it had none; or it came into being as stated in the Big Bang theory, and is either constantly expanding or it is not.  Evolution exists or it does not.  As a rule, such theories are proven “true” by the simple process of excluding anything else that seems contradictory, and so generally your scientific theories carry the weight of strong validity within their own frameworks.

In those frameworks you have made certain classifications that now appear quite obvious.  Common sense upholds them, and it seems impossible to consider reality otherwise.  Yet by their nature such categories structure your experience of reality itself to such an extent that any alternate ways of perceiving life seem not only untrustworthy, but completely impossible.

Thusly, your classifications of various species appear to you as the only logical kinds of divisions that could be made among living things.  Quite the contrary is the case, however.  That particular overall method of separation leads to such questions as: “Which species came first, and which came later, and how did the various species emerge – one from the other?”  Those questions are further brought about by your time classifications, without which they would be meaningless.

Your classifications in such respects set up exterior divisions.  Now these serve as quite handy reference points, but basically speaking they in no way affect the natural experience of those various living creatures that you refer to as “other species”.

Your specializations work as long as you stay within the framework, though then you must wrestle with the questions that such divisions automatically entail.  It is perhaps difficult for you to realize that these are written and verbalized categories that in no real manner tell you anything about the actual experience of other creatures – but only note habits, tendencies, and separations of the most exterior nature.

If your purpose is to comprehend what other living creatures perceive, then the methods you are using are at the best shortsighted, and at the worst they completely defeat your purpose.  For example: No matter what information or data you receive as the result of animal experimentation or dissection for scientific purposes, and no matter how valuable the results appear to be, the consequences of such methods are so distorted that you comprehend less of life than you did before.

The answers to the origins of the universe and of the species lie, I’m afraid, in realms that you have largely ignored – precisely in those domains that you have considered least scientific, and in those that it appeared would yield the least practical results.

Your present methods will simply bring you pat, manufactured results and answers.  They will satisfy neither the intellect nor the soul.  Since your universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of your own existence, you must look where you have not before – into the reality of your minds and emotions.  You must look to the natural universe that you know.  You must look with your intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about you, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

You must study the quality of life, dare to follow the patterns of your own thoughts and emotions, and to ride that mobility, for in that mobility there are hints of the origin of the universe and of the psyche.  The poet’s view of the universe and of nature is more scientific, then, than the scientist’s, for more of nature is comprehended.

The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet, understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classifications of all the world’s flowers.  Information is not necessarily knowledge or comprehension.

Thoughts spring into your mind as the objective universe swims into reality – that is, in the same fashion.  Diagramming sentences tells you little about the spoken language, and nothing about those miraculous physical and mental performances that allow you to speak – and so diagramming the species of the world is, in the same way, quite divorced from any true understanding.

The subjective feeling of your being, your intimate experience from moment-to-moment – these possess the same mysterious quality that it seems to you the universe possesses.  You are mortal, and everywhere encounter evidence of that mortality, and yet within its framework your feelings and thoughts have a reality to you personally that transcends all such classifications.  You know that physically you will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somewhere eternal.

Through such feelings the psyche breaks through all misconceptions, hinting at the nature of the self and of the universe at once.

In a larger level of actuality, then, there is no beginning or end to the universe, and at that level there are no contradictions.  There is no beginning or end to the psyche, either.  You may say: “Granted”, yet persist, saying: “In our terms however, when did the world begin, and in what manner?”  Yet the very attempt to place such an origin in time makes almost any answer distorted.

The truth is that the answers lie in your own experience.  They are implied in your own spontaneous behavior – that is, in the wondrous activity of your bodies and minds.

You walk quite well without having at your fingertips any conscious knowledge of the inner mechanism’s activity.  You may have been told, or you may have read about the body’s anatomy, and the interaction of its parts.  Yet whether or not you have such information, you walk quite as well.  Such data therefore do not help your walking performance any.

For that matter, an athlete may have a great zest for motion and an impatience with reading, caring not what within the body makes it move as long as its performance is superb – while an invalid with great book knowledge about all of the body’s parts is quite unable to physically perform in a normal manner.

Your body knows how to walk.  The knowledge is built-in and acted upon.  The body knows how to heal itself, how to use its nourishment, how to replace its tissues, yet in your terms the body itself has no access to the kind of information the mind possesses.  Being so ignorant, how does it perform so well?

If it were scientifically inclined, the body would know that such spontaneous performance was impossible, for science cannot explain the reality of life itself in its present form, much less its origins.

Consciousness within the body knows that its existence is within the body’s context, and apart from it at the same time.  In ordinary life during the day consciousness often takes a recess, so to speak – it daydreams, or otherwise experiences itself as somewhat apart from the body’s reality.  At night, in sleep, the self’s consciousness takes longer, freer recesses from physical reality, and does this as spontaneously as the body itself walks.  These experiences are not hypothetical.  They happen to each person.  On such occasions, each person is to some extent aware of a kind of comprehension that is not dependent upon the accumulation of data, but of a deeper kind of experience and direct encounter with the reality from which the world emerges.

This is the kind of wordless knowledge the body possesses, that brings forth your physical motion and results in the spectacular preciseness of bodily response.  It is, then, highly practical.  In your terms, the same force that formed the world forms your subjective reality now, and is a source of the natural universe.

Exploring those realities lovingly will bring you into direct contact with inner dimensions of your being, providing intuitive understandings that are of greatest import.

The motion of the universe appears in the motion of your own intimate experience, and in that seemingly most nebulous area the answers will be found.