session 831

Mass Events, Session 831

Organized religion has committed many important blunders, yet for centuries Christianity provided a context accepted by large portions of the known world, in which experience could be judged against very definite “rules” – experience once focused, chiseled, and yet allowed some rich expression as long as it stayed within the boundaries set by religious dogma.

If a man was a sinner, still there was a way of redemption, and the immortality of the soul went largely unquestioned, of course.  There were set rules for almost all kinds of social encounters and religious experiences.  There were set ceremonies accepted by nearly all for death and birth, and the important stages in between.  Church was the authority, and the individual lived out his or her life almost automatically structuring personal experience so that it fit within the accepted norm.

Within those boundaries, certain kinds of experience flourished, and of course others did not.  In your society there is no such overall authority.  The individual must make his or her own way through a barrage of different value systems, making decisions that were largely unthought-of when a son followed his father’s trade automatically, for example, or when marriages were made largely for economic reasons.

So your present experience is quite different than that of those forefathers who lived in the medieval world, say, and you cannot appreciate the differences in your [present] subjective attitudes, and in the quality, as well as the kind of, social intercourse that exists now.  For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life.  There was no question but that life had meaning, whether or not you might agree as to the particular meaning assigned to it.

Men’s dreams were also different in those times, filled far more with metaphysical images, for example, more alive with saints and demons – but overall one framework of belief existed, and all experience was judged in its light.  Now, you have far more decisions to make, and in a world of conflicting beliefs, brought into your living room through newspapers and television, you must try to find the meaning of your life, or the meaning of life.

You can think in terms of experiments.  You may try this or that.  You may run from one religion to another, or from religion to science, or vice versa.  This is true in a way that was impossible for the masses of the people in medieval times.  The improved methods of communication alone mean that you are everywhere surrounded by varying theories, cultures, cults, and schools.  In some important areas this means that the mechanics of experience are actually becoming more apparent, for they are no longer hidden beneath one belief system.

Your subjective options are far greater, and yet so of course is the necessity to place that subjective experience into meaningful terms.  If you believe that you do indeed form your own reality, then you instantly come up against a whole new group of questions.  If you actually construct your own experience, individually and en masse, why does so much of it seem negative?  You create your own reality, or it is created for you.  It is an accidental universe, or it is not.

Now in medieval times organized religion, or organized Christianity, presented each individual with a screen of beliefs through which the personal self was perceived.  Portions of the self that were not perceivable through that screen were almost invisible to the private person.  Problems were sent by God as punishment or warning.  The mechanics of experience were hidden behind that screen.

The beliefs of [Charles] Darwin and of [Sigmund] Freud alike have formed together to give you a different screen.  Experience is accepted and perceived only as it is sieved through that screen.  If Christendom saw man as blighted by original sin, Darwinian and Freudian views see him as part of a flawed species in which individual life rests precariously, ever at the beck and call of the species’ needs, and with survival as the prime goal – a survival, however, without meaning.  The psyche’s grandeur is ignored, the individual’s sense of belonging with nature eroded, for it is at nature’s expense, it seems, that he must survive.  One’s greatest dreams and worst fears alike become the result of glandular imbalance, or of neuroses from childhood traumas.

Yet in the midst of these beliefs each individual seeks to find a context in which his or her life has meaning, a purpose which will rouse the self to action, a drama in whose theme private actions will have significance.

There are intellectual values and emotional ones, and sometimes there are needs of an emotional nature that must be met regardless of intellectual judgments.  The church provided a cosmic drama in which even the life of the sinner had value, even if only to show God’s compassion.  In your society, however, the sterile psychic environment often leads to rebellion: People take steps to bring meaning and drama into their lives, even if intellectually they refuse to make the connection.

When God went out the window for large masses of people, fate took His place, and volition also became eroded.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which he seemingly had little control.  The devil went underground, figuratively speaking, so that many of his mischievous qualities and devious characteristics were assigned to the unconscious.  Man was seen as divided against himself – a conscious figurehead, resting uneasily above the mighty haunches of unconscious beastliness.  He believed himself to be programmed by his heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.

Not only was he set against himself, but he saw himself as a part of an uncaring mechanistic universe, devoid of purpose, intent, and certainly a universe that cared not a whit for the individual, but only for the species.  Indeed, a strange world.

It was in many respects a new world, for it was the first one in which large portions of humanity believed that they were isolated from nature and God, and in which no grandeur was acknowledged as a characteristic of the soul.  Indeed, for many people the idea of the soul itself became unfashionable, embarrassing, and out of date.  Here I use the words “soul” and “psyche” synonymously.  That psyche has been emerging more and more in whatever guise it is allowed to as it seeks to express its vitality, its purpose and exuberance, and as it seeks out new contexts in which to express a subjective reality that finally spills over the edges of sterile beliefs.

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the thrust from which life springs, and it seeks the fulfillment of the individual – and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative.  It projects its desires outward onto the physical world, seeking through private experience and social contact to actualize its potentials, and in such a way that the potentials of others are also encouraged.  It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.

Basically, religion is an activity through which man attempts to see the meaning of his life.  It is a construction based on deep psychic knowledge.  No matter what the name it might go by, it represents man’s connection with the universe.

Session 830

Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Experience

Session 830

Your world and everything in it exists first in the imagination, then.  You have been taught to focus all of your attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for you.  Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear for you.  Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective – or somehow not real – and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data.

You usually think, for example, that your feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the event itself.  It seldom occurs to you that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to your emotions, rather than the other way around.  The all-important matter of your focus is largely responsible for your interpretation of any event.

EXERCISE

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rockbed reality” from which individual physical events emerge.  Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak.  Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of your own subjective reality.  Forget what you have learned about reactions and stimuli.  Ignore for a time everything you have believed and see your thoughts as the real events.  Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to your own feelings and beliefs.  For indeed your subjective world causes your physical experience.

In titling this Chapter I used the word “mechanics”, because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings.  While the world is not a machine – its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them – this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence.  Again, your interpretations of identity teach you to focus awareness in such a way that you cannot follow the strands of consciousness that connect you with all portions of nature.  In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom – a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which the smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected with the whole.

Even those of you who intellectually agree that you form your own reality find it difficult to accept emotionally in certain areas.  You are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise in response to events.  Your feelings, however, cause the events you perceive.  Secondarily, you do of course then react to those events.

You have been taught that your feelings must necessarily be tied to specific physical happenings.  You may be sad because a relative has died, for example, or because you have lost a job, or because you have been rebuffed by a lover, or for any number of other accepted reasons.  You are told that your feelings must be in response to events that are happening, or have happened.  Often, of course, your feelings “happen ahead of time”, because those feelings are the initial realities from which events flow.

A relative might be ready to die, though no exterior sign has been given.  The relative’s feelings might well be mixed, containing portions of relief and sadness, which you might then perceive – but the primary events are subjective.

It is somewhat of a psychological trick, in your day and age, to come to the realization that you do in fact form your experience and your world, simply because the weight of evidence seems to be so loaded at the other end, because of your habits of perception.  The realization is like one that comes at one time or another to many people in the dream state, when suddenly they “awaken” while still in the dream, realizing first of all that they are dreaming, and secondarily that they are themselves creating the experienced drama.

To understand that you create your own reality requires that same kind of “awakening” from the normal awake state – at least for many people.  Some of course have this knack more than others.  The realization itself does indeed change “the rules of the game” as far as you are concerned to a rather considerable degree.  There are reasons why I am mentioning this now rather than in earlier books.  Indeed, our books follow their own rhythms, and this one is in a way a further elaboration upon The Nature of Personal Reality.

As long as you believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for your actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then you cannot consciously understand your own creativity, or play the role in the universe that you are capable of playing as individuals or as a species.  You will instead live in a world where events happen to you, in which you must do sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see yourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

While still preserving the integrity of physical events as you understand them, [each of] you must alter the focus of your attention to some extent, so that you begin to perceive the connections between your subjective reality at any given time, and those events that you perceive at any given time.  You are the initiator of those events.

This recognition does indeed involve a new performance on the part of your own consciousness, a mental and imaginative leap that gives you control and direction over achievements that you have always performed, though without your conscious awareness.

As mentioned before, early man had such an identification of subjective and objective realities.  As a species, however, you have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature – a world of technology in which you also now have your existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it.  To develop that kind of structure necessitated a division between subjective and objective worlds.  Now, however, it is highly important that you realize your position, and accomplish the manipulation of consciousness that will allow you to take true conscious responsibility for your actions and your experience.

You can “come awake” from your normal waking state, and that is the natural next step for consciousness to follow – one for which your biology has already equipped you.  Indeed, each person does attain that recognition now and then.  It brings triumphs and challenges as well.  In those areas of life where you are satisfied, give yourselves credit, and in those areas where you are not, remind yourselves that you are involved in a learning process; you are daring enough to accept the responsibility for your actions.

Let us look more clearly, however, at the ways in which your private world causes your daily experience, and how it merges with the experience of others.

Session 829

Mass Events, Session 829

The animals do have imagination, regardless of your current thought.  Yet man is so gifted that he directs his experience and forms his civilizations largely through the use of his imaginative abilities.

You do not understand this point clearly at all, but your social organizations, your governments – these are based upon imaginative principles.  The basis of your most intimate experience, the framework behind all of your organized structures, rests upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed though its auspices.

It is now nearing Easter (on March 26), and the yearly commemoration of what is considered historic fact: the [resurrection and] ascension of Christ into heaven.  Untold millions have in one way or another commemorated that occasion through the centuries.  Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor.  There have been numberless village festivals, or intimate family gatherings, and church services performed on Easter Sundays now forgotten.  There have been bloody wars fought on the same account, and private persecutions in which those who did not agree with one or another’s religious dogmas were quite simply killed “for the good of their souls”.

There have been spiritual rebirths and regenerations – and ungodly slaughter as well, as a result of the meaning of Easter.  Blood and flesh have certainly been touched then, and lives changed in that regard.

All of those religious and political structures that you certainly recognize as valid, arising from the “event” of Christ’s ascension, existed – do exist – because of an idea.  The idea was the result of a spectacular act of the imagination that then leapt upon the historical landscape, highlighting all of the events of the time, so that they became illuminated indeed with a blessed and unearthly light.

The idea of man’s survival of death was not new.  The idea of a god’s “descent” to earth was ancient.  The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future.  The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only rites remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer.  The time was ripe for Christianity.

Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one.  A man, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being] survives death – by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically-perceived, into heaven.  Each man does survive death, and each woman, but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as “proof of the pudding”.

Again, Christ was not crucified.  The historical Christ, as he is thought of, was a man illuminated by psychic realities, touched with the infinite realization that any one given individual was, by virtue of his or her existence, a contact between All That Is and mankind.

Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met – and that man survived death by virtue of his existence within the divine.  Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity’s name came from “following the letter rather than the spirit of the law”, or by insistence upon literal interpretations – while the spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.

Again, man directs his existence through the use of his imagination – a feat that does distinguish him from the animals.  What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination.  Patriotism, family loyalty, political affiliations – the ideas behind these have the greatest practical applications in your world.  You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth.  You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes.  Unless you think quite consistently – and deeply – the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience and the mass world in which you live.

The theory of evolution, for instance, is an imaginative construct, and yet through its lights some generations now have viewed their world.  It is not only that you think of yourselves differently, but you actually experience a different kind of self.  Your institutions change their aspects accordingly, so that experience fits the beliefs that you have about it.  You act in certain ways.  You view the entire universe in a fashion that did not exist before, so that imagination and belief intangibly structure your subjective experience and your objective circumstances.

The idea of a meaningless universe, however, is in itself a highly creative imaginative act.  Animals, for example, could not imagine such an idiocy, so that the theory shows the incredible accomplishment of an obviously ordered mind and intellect that can imagine itself to be the result of non-order, or chaos – [you have] a creature who is capable of “mapping” its own brain, imagining that the brain’s fantastic regulated order could emerge from a reality that itself has no meaning.  Indeed, then, the theory actually says that the ordered universe magically emerged – and evolutionists must certainly believe in a God of Chance somewhere, or in Coincidence with a capital C, for their theories would make no sense at all otherwise.

The world of the imagination is indeed your contact with your own source.  Its characteristics are the closest to those in Framework 2 that you can presently encounter.

Your experience of history, of the days of your life, is invisibly formed by those ideas that exist in imagination only, and then are projected upon the physical world.  This applies to your individual beliefs about yourself and the way you see yourself in your imagination.  You are having wars between the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians once again, because emphasis is put upon literal interpretations of spiritual truths.

In each person the imaginative world, its force and power, merges into historical reality.  In each person, the ultimate and unassailable and unquenchable power of All That Is is individualized, and dwells in time.  Man’s imagination can carry him into those other realms – but when he tries to squeeze those truths into frameworks too small, he distorts and bends inner realities so that they become jagged dogmas.

The latest growth of fundamentalist religion has arisen as countermeasure against the theories of evolution.  You have, then, an overcompensation, for in the Darwinian world there was no meaning and no laws.  There were no standards of right or wrong, so that large portions of the people felt rootless.

The [fundamentalists] returned to an authoritarian religion in which the slightest act must be regulated.  They gave release, and they are giving release, to the emotions, and are thus rebelling against scientific intellectualism.  They will see the world in black-and-white terms again, with good and evil clearly delineated in the most simplistic terms, and thus escape a slippery, thematic universe, in which man’s feelings seemed to give him no foothold at all.

Unfortunately, the fundamentalists accept literal interpretations of intuitive realities in such a way that they further narrow the channels through which their psychic abilities can flow.  The fundamental framework, in this period of time, for all of its fervor, is not rich – as for example Christianity was in the past, with its numerous saints.  It is instead a fanatical Puritan vein, peculiarly American in character, and restrictive rather than expansive, for the bursts of emotion are highly structured – that is, the emotions are limited in most areas of life, permitted only an explosive religious expression under certain conditions, when they are not so much spontaneously expresses as suddenly released from the dam of usual repression.

The imagination always seeks expression.  It is always creative, and underneath the frameworks of society it provides fresh incentives and new avenues for fulfillment, that can become harnessed through fanatical belief.  When this happens your institutions become more repressive, and violence often emerges as a result.

If you look for signs of God’s vengeance you will find them everywhere.  An avalanche or a flood or an earthquake will not be seen as a natural act of the earth’s natural creativity, but instead as a punishment from God for sin.

In evolution man’s nature is amoral, and anything goes for survival’s sake.  There is no possibility of any spiritual survival as far as most evolutionists are concerned.  The fundamentalists would rather believe in man’s inherent sinful nature, for at least their belief system provides for a framework in which he can be saved.  Christ’s message was that each man is good inherently, and is an individualized portion of the divine – and yet a civilization based upon that precept has never been attempted.  The vast social structures of Christianity were instead based upon man’s “sinful” nature – not the organizations and structures that might allow him to become good, or to obtain the goodness that Christ quite clearly perceived man already possessed.

It seems almost a sacrilege to say that man is good, when everywhere you meet contradictions, for too often man certainly appears to act as if his motives were instead those of a born killer.  You have been taught not to trust the very fabric of your being.  You cannot expect yourselves to act rationally or altruistically in any consistent manner if you believe that you are automatically degraded, or that your nature is so flawed that such performance is uncharacteristic.

You are a part of nature that has learned to make choices, a part of nature that naturally and automatically produces dreams and beliefs about which you often organize your reality.  There are many effects which you do not like, but you possess a unique kind of consciousness, in which each individual has a hand in the overall formation of a world reality, and you are participating at a level of existence in which you are learning how to transform the imaginative realm of possibilities into a more or less specific, physically experienced world.

In a way you choose from an infinite, endless, incomputable number of ideas, and sculpt these into the physical fragments that compose normal experience.  You do this in such a way that the timeless events are experienced in time, and so that they mix and merge to conform to the dimensions of your reality.  Along the way there are accomplishments that are as precious as any creatures of any kind could produce.  There are also great failures – but these are failures only in comparison with the glittering inner knowledge of the imagination that holds for you those ideals against which you judge your acts.

Those ideals are present in each individual.  They are natural inclinations toward growth and fulfillment.

Session 628

Mass Events, Session 828

In your terms, speaking more or less historically, early man was in a more conscious relationship with Framework 2 than you are now.

As Ruburt mentioned in Psychic Politics, there are many gradations of consciousness, and as I mentioned in The Nature of the Psyche, early man used his consciousness in other ways than those you are familiar with.  He often perceived what you would call the products of the imagination as sense data, for example, more or less objectified in the physical world.

The imagination has always dealt with creativity, and as man began to settle upon a kind of consciousness that dealt with cause and effect, he no longer physically perceived the products of his imagination directly in the old manner.  He realized in those earlier times that illness, for instance, was initially as much the result of the imagination as health was, for he experienced far more directly the brilliant character of his own imagination.  The lines between imaginative and physical experience have blurred for you, and of course they have also become tempered by other beliefs and the experiences that those beliefs then engender.

I am putting this very simply here.  It is far more complicated – and yet early man, for example, became aware of the fact that no man was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another.  Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured – and in those days the cures worked.

Regardless of your histories, those early men and women were quite healthy.  They had strong teeth and bones.  They dealt with the physical world through the purposeful use of the imagination, however, in a way now most difficult to understand.  They realized they were mortal, and must die, but their greater awareness of Framework 2 allowed them a larger identification, so they understood that death was not only a natural necessity, but also an opportunity for other kinds of experiences and development.

They felt their relationship with nature acutely, experiencing it in a far different fashion than you do yours.  They felt that it was the larger expression of their own moods and temperament, the materialization of self-events that were too vast to be contained within the flesh of any one individual or any group of individuals.  They wondered where their thoughts went after they had them, and they imagined that in one way or another those thoughts turned into the birds and rocks, the animals and trees that were themselves ever-changing.

They also felt that they were themselves, however; that as humans [they were] the manifestation of the larger expression of nature that was too splendid to be contained alone within nature’s framework, that nature needed them – that is, men – to give it another kind of voice.  When men spoke they spoke for themselves; yet because they felt so a part of the natural environment they spoke for nature also, and for all of its creatures.

Much is not understood in your interpretations.  In that world men knew that nature was balanced.  Both animals and men must die.  If a man was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey – at least, not in the deepest of terms.  And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts”, or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.

Men in those times protected themselves against storms, and yet in the same way they did not begrudge the storm its victims.  They simply changed the alliances of their consciousnesses from the identification of self-within-the-flesh to self-within-the-storm.  Man’s and nature’s intents were largely the same, and understood as such.  Man did not fear the elements in those early times, as is now supposed.

Some of the experiences known by early man would seem quite foreign to you now.  Yet in certain forms they come down through the centuries.  Early man, again, perceived himself as himself, an individual.  He felt that nature expressed for him the vast power of his own emotions.  He projected himself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that later turned into the god of Olympus, for example.  He was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he perceived his own version of those individualized consciousnesses which much later became the elementals, or small spirits.  But above all he was aware of nature’s source.

He was filled with wonder as his own consciousness ever-newly came into being.  He had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that your own consciousness has now achieved – so when he thought a thought he was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from?  His own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, its changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky.  The relative smoothness of your own consciousness – in those terms, at least – was gained at the expense of certain other experiences, therefore, that were possible otherwise.  You could not live in your present world of time if your consciousness was as playful, curious, and creative as it was, for [then] time was also experienced differently.

It may be difficult for you to understand, but the events that you now recognize are as much the result of the realm of the imagination, as those experienced by early man when he perceived as real happenings that now you would consider hallucinatory, or purely imaginative.

It seems quite clear to you that the mass events of nature are completely outside of your domain.  You feel you have no part in nature except as you exert control over it through technology, or harm it, again through technology.  You grant that the weather has an effect upon your moods, but any deeper psychic or psychological connections between you and the elements strikes most of you as quite impossible.

You use terms like “being flooded by emotion”, however, and other very intuitive statements showing your own deeper recognition of events that quite escape you when you examine them through reason alone.  Man actually courts storms.  He seeks them out, for emotionally he understands quite well their part in his own private life, and their necessity on a physical level.  Through nature’s manifestations, particularly through its power, man senses nature’s source and his own, and knows that the power can carry him to emotional realizations that are required for his own greater spiritual and psychic developments.

Death is not an end, but a transformation of consciousness.  Nature, with its changing seasons, constantly brings you that message.  In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.

Your concepts about death and nature, however, force you to see man and nature as adversaries, and also program your experience of such events so that they seem to only confirm what you already believe.  As I mentioned earlier, each person caught in either an epidemic or a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances.  Such conditions also often involve events in which the individual senses a larger identification, however – even sometimes a renewed sense of purpose that makes no sense in ordinary terms.

Session 827

Mass Events, Session 827

A potpourri.  Heredity plays far less a part in the so-called formation of character than is generally supposed.

For that matter, [the same is true of] environment, as it is usually understood.  Your cultural beliefs predispose you to interpret experience in terms of heredity and environment, however, so that you focus primarily upon them as prime causes of behavior.  This in turn results in much more structured experience than necessary.  You do not concentrate upon the exceptions – the children who do not seem to fit the patterns of their families of environments, so of course no attempts are made to view those kinds of unofficial behavior.

Because of this, large organized patterns behind human activity often escape your notice almost completely.  You read constantly of people who seem to have been most affected by fictional characters, for example, or by personalities from the past, or by complete strangers, more than they have been affected by their own families.  Such situations are considered oddities.

The human personality is far more open to all kinds of stimuli than is supposed.  If information is thought to come to the self only through physical means, then of course heredity and environment must be seen behind human motivation.  When you realize that the personality can and does have access to other kinds of information than physical, then you must begin to wonder what effects those data have on the formation of character and individual growth.  Children do already possess character at birth, and the entire probable intent of their lives exists then as surely as does the probable plan for the adult body they will later possess.

Consciousness forms the genes, and not the other way around, and the about-to-be-born infant is the agency that adds new material through the chromosomal structure.  The child is from birth far more aware of all kinds of physical events than is realized also.  But beside that, the child uses the early years to explore – particularly in the dream state – other kinds of material that suit its own fancies and intents, and it constantly receives a stream of information that is not at all dependent upon its heredity or environment.

On these other levels the child knows, for example, of its contemporaries born at about the same time.  Each person’s “individual” life plan fits in somewhere with that of his or her contemporaries.  Those plans are communicated one to the other, and probabilities instantly are set into motion in Framework 2.  To some degree or another calculations are made so that, for instance, individual A will meet individual B at a marketplace 30 years later – if this fits in with the intents of both parties.  There will be certain cornerstone encounters in each person’s life that are set up as strong probabilities, or as plans to be grown into.

There are bodies of events, then, that in a certain fashion you will materialize almost in the same way that you will materialize your own adult body from the structure of the fetus.  In those terms the body works with physical properties – though again these properties, as discussed often, have their own consciousness and realities.

Your mental life deals with psychological events, obviously, but beneath so-called normal awareness the child grows toward the mental body of events that will compose his or her life.  Those unique intents that characterize each individual exists in Framework 2, then – and with birth those intents immediately begin to impress the physical world of Framework 1.

Each child’s birth changes the world, obviously, for it sets up an instant psychological momentum that begins to affect action in Framework 1 and Framework 2 alike.

A child may be born with a strong talent for music, for example.  Say the child is unusually gifted.  Before he [or she] is old enough to begin any kind of training, he will know on other levels the probable direction that music will take during his lifetime.  He will be acquainted in the dream state with other young budding musicians, though they are infants also.  Again, probabilities will be set into motion, so that each child’s intent reaches out.  There is great flexibility, however, and according to individual purposes many such children will also be acquainted with music of the past.  To one extent or another this applies to every field of endeavor as each person adds to the world scene, and as the intents of each individual, added to those of each other person alive, multiply – so that the fulfillment of the individual results in the accomplishments of your world.  And the lack of fulfillment of course produces those lacks that are also so apparent.

Some readers have brothers or sisters, or both.  Others are only children.  Your ideas of individuality hamper you to a large extent.  To one extent or another, again, each portion of consciousness, while itself, contains [the] potentials of all consciousnesses.  Your private information about the world is not nearly as private as you suppose, therefore, for behind the experience of any one event, each of you possesses information pertaining to other dimensions of the same event that you do not ordinarily perceive.

If you are involved in any kind of mass happening, from a concert to an avalanche, you are aware on other levels of all of the actions leading to that specific participation.  If buildings are constructed of bricks quite visible, so mass events are formed by many small, invisible happenings – each, however, fitting together quite precisely in a kind of psychological masonry in which each of you has a mental hand.  This applies to mass conversions and to natural disasters alike.

Session 826

Mass Events, Session 826

You must understand that in a manner of speaking, Framework 2 is on the one hand an invisible version of the physical universe.  On the other hand, however, it is far more than that, for it contains within it probable variations of that universe – from the most cosmic scale, say, down to probable versions of the most minute events of any given physical day.

In simple terms, your body has an invisible counterpart in Framework 2.  During life that counterpart is so connected with your own physical tissues, however, that it can be misleading to say that the two – the visible and invisible bodies – are separate.  In the same way that your thoughts have a reality in Framework 2, and only for the sake of a meaningful analogy, thoughts could be said to be the equivalent, now, of objects; for in Framework 2 thoughts and feelings are far more important even than objects are in physical reality.

In Framework 2 thoughts instantly form patterns.  They are the “natural elements” in that psychological environment that mix, merge, and combine to form, if you will, the psychological cells, atoms, and molecules that compose events.  In those terms, the physical events that you perceive or experience can be compared to “psychological objects” that appear to exist with a physical concreteness in space and time.  Such events usually seem to begin somewhere in space and time, and clearly end there as well.

You can look at an object like a table and see its definitions in space.  To some extent you are too close to psychological events to perceive them in the same fashion, of course, yet usual experience seems to have a starting point and a conclusion.  Instead, experienced events usually involve only surface perceptions.  You observe a table’s surface as smooth and solid, even though you realize it is composed of atoms and molecules full of motions.

In the same way, you experience a birthday party, an automobile accident, a bridge game, or any psychological event as psychologically solid, with a smooth experienced surface that holds together in space and time.  Such events, however, consist of indivisible “particles” and faster-than-light perceptions that never show.  In other words, they contain psychic components that flow from Framework 2 into Framework 1.

Any event, therefore has an invisible thickness, a multidimensional basis.  Your skies are filled with breezes, currents, clouds, sunlight, dust particles and so forth.  The sky vaults above the entire planet.  The invisible [vault of] Framework 2 contains endless patterns that change as, say, clouds do – that mix and merge to form your psychological climate.  Thoughts have what we will for now term electromagnetic properties.  In those terms, your thoughts mix and match with others in Framework 2, creating mass patterns that form the overall psychological basis behind world events.  Again, however, Framework 2 is not neutral, but automatically inclined toward what we will here term good or constructive developments.  It is a growth medium.  Constructive or “positive” feelings or thoughts are more easily materialized than “negative” ones, because they are in keeping with Framework 2’s characteristics.

If that were not the case, your own species would not have existed as long as it has.  Nor would the constructs of civilizations – art, commerce, or even technology – have been possible.  Framework 2 combines order and spontaneity, but its order is of another kind.  It is a circular, associative, “naturally ordering process”, in which spontaneity automatically exists in the overall order that will best fulfill the potentials of consciousness.

At birth, each person is automatically equipped with the capacity toward natural growth that will most completely satisfy its own abilities – not at the expense of others, but in an overall context in which the fulfillment of each individual assures the fulfillment of each other individual.

In those terms there is “an ideal” psychological pattern to which you are yourself intimately connected.  The inner ego constantly moves you in that direction.  On the other hand, that pattern is not rigid, but flexible enough to take advantage of changing circumstances, even as a plant will turn toward the sun though you move it from room to room while the sunlight varies its directions.  The inner ego does not exist in time as you do, however, so it relies upon your assessment of situations with which your reasoning is equipped to cope.

Obviously there are objects of all sizes, durability, and weight.  There are also “vast psychological objects”, then, sweeping mass events, for example, in which whole countries might be involved.  There are also mass natural events of varying degrees, as say, the flooding of large areas.  Such events involve psychological configurations on the part of all those involved, so that the inner individual patterns of those lives touched by each such event have in one way or another a common purpose that at the same time serves the overall reality on a natural planetary basis.  In order to endure, the planet itself must be involved in constant change and instability.  I know it is difficult to comprehend, but every object that you perceive – grass or rock or stone – even ocean waves or clouds – any physical phenomenon – has its own invisible consciousness, its own intent and emotional coloration.  Each is also endowed with patterns toward growth and fulfillment – not at the expense of the rest of nature, but to the contrary, so that every other element of nature may also be completed.

At certain levels these intents of man and nature may merge.  I am speaking in very simple terms now, and yet those involved in a flood, for example, want the past washed away, or want to be flooded by bursts of vital emotions such as disasters often bring.  They want to feel a renewed sense of nature’s power, and often, though devastated, they use the experience to start a new life.

Those with other intents will find excuses to leave such areas.  There will be, perhaps, a chance meeting that will result in a hasty trip.  On a hunch someone else might suddenly leave the area to find a new job, or decide to visit a friend in another state.  Those whose experiences do not merge with nature’s in that regard will not be part of that mass event.  They will act on information that comes to them from Framework 2.  Those who stay also act on the same information, by choosing to participate.

When you enter time and physical life, you are already aware of its conditions.  You are biologically and psychologically predisposed to grow within that rich environment, to contribute on all levels to the fulfillment of your species – but more than this, to add your own unique viewpoint and experience to the greater patterns of consciousness of which you are a part.

You are beginning to understand the intimate connections that exist in your physical environment.  The psychological connections, however, are far more complicated, so that each individual’s dreams and thoughts interweave with every other person’s, forming ever-changing patterns of desire and intent.  Some of these emerge as physical events, and some do not.

Session 825

Mass Events, Session 825

The physical universe is the result of idea construction, as Ruburt perceived in the experience mentioned in the last session.

That perception was not the sort of official sense data recognized by your sciences.  Ruburt did not come to his recognition of the world’s mental source through reasoning.  Neither could any ordinary physical perception have given him that information.  His consciousness left his body – an event not even considered possible by many educated people.  Ruburt’s consciousness merged, while still retaining its own individuality, with the consciousness of the leaves outside his window, and with the nail in the windowsill, and traveled outward and inward at the same time, so that like a mental wind his consciousness traveled through other psychological neighborhoods.

The origin of your universe is nonphysical, and each event, however grand or minute, has its birth in the Framework 2 environment.  Your physical universe arose from that inner framework, then, and continues to do so.

The power that fuels your thoughts has the same source.  In a manner of speaking the universe as you understand it, with all the events that it includes, functions “automatically” in its important processes, as your own body does.  Your individual desires and intents direct that activity of your body’s spontaneous processes – that is, your body walks across the floor at you command as a result of your wishes, even though the processes involved must happen “by themselves”.

Your intents have a great effect upon your body’s health.  In the same fashion, jointly all of the people alive at any given time “direct” the events of the universe to behave in a certain fashion, even though the processes must happen by themselves, or automatically.  Other species have a hand in this also, however, and in one way or another all of you direct the activity of the physical body of the world in much the same way that you [each] direct your bodily behavior.

You were born with the impetus toward growth built in – automatically provided with the inner blueprints that would lead to a developed adult form.  Not only the cells, but the atoms and molecules that compose them contained a positive intent to cooperate in a bodily formation, to fulfill themselves, and they were then predisposed not only toward survival, but with an idealization leading toward the best possible development and maturity.

All of those characteristics have their sources in Framework 2, for the psychological medium in Framework 2 is automatically conducive to creativity.  It is not simply a neutral dimension, therefore, but contains within itself an automatic predisposition toward the fulfillment of all patterns inherent within it.  As William James said in Ruburt’s book, “The universe is of good intent”.  It is automatically predisposed, again, toward the creation of “good” events.  I put the word “good” in quotes for now because of your misconceptions about the nature of good and evil, which we will discuss somewhat later.

To that extent then the physical universe, like each physical body, is “magical”.  I use the term purposefully, for it confounds the dictates of your adult reasoning, and perhaps by so confounding what you think of as reason, I may manage to arouse within you a hint of what I refer to as the higher intellect.

Reasoning by itself can only deal with deductions made about the known world.  It cannot accept knowledge that comes from “elsewhere”, for such information will not fit in reason’s categories, and confounds its cause-and-effect patterning.  The power to reason comes from Framework 2.  In the terms of this discussion, you are able to reason as a result of “magical” events that make reason itself possible.  The term “magic” has in one way or another been used to simply describe events for which reason has no answer – events that exist outside of the framework in which reason feels comfortable.

Your scientists consider themselves quite rational, yet many of them, at least, would be more honest when they tried to describe the beginning of the universe if they admitted that reason alone cannot provide any true insight.  Each of you are as familiar with the so-called birth of the universe, as close to it or as distant [from it], as your own recognized consciousness is to your own physical birth, for the initiation of awareness and sensation in one infant really carries all of the same questions as those involved with the birth of the universe.

The mother could not consciously control the bodily processes that lead to birth.  In the truest sense, the birth magically happens, as miraculous in those terms as the so-called initial emergence of life upon the planet itself.  Scientific analysis of the brain will tell you nothing about the power that moves your thoughts, or hint at the source of the brain’s abilities.  However, the constant activity between Frameworks 1 and 2 is constantly apparent in the very existence of your world, and in the relationships involving your imagination, feelings, and beliefs, and those private and shared events that compose your experience.

I do not mean to speak of reason in derogatory terms, for it is well suited to its purposes, which are vital in your reality.  It is also true that in the deepest terms you have not developed your reasoning, so that your version of it is bound to result in some distortions.

Nor do I mean to agree with those who ask you to use your intuitions and feelings at the expense of your reason.  Instead I will suggest other paths later in this book.  Your reasoning as you now use it, however, deals primarily with reality by dividing it into categories, forming distinctions, following the “laws” of cause and effect – and largely its realm is the examination of events already perceived.  In other words, it deals with the concrete nature of ascertained events that are already facts in your world.

On the other hand, your intuitions follow a different kind of organization, as does your imagination – one involved with associations, an organization that unifies diverse elements and brings even known events together in a kind of unity that is often innocent of the limitations dictated by cause and effect.  In those terms, then, Framework 2 deals with associations, so that within it the recognizable events of the physical world can be put together in an infinite number of ways, after which they appear in your private experience according to directions you have given them through those associations that you form mentally.

The coincidences that seem to happen, the chance encounters, the unexpected events – all of these come into your experience because in one way or another you have attracted them, even though their occurrences might seem to have insurmountable odds against them.  Those odds – those impediments – do not exist in Framework 2.

To some extent or another, your intuitions acquaint you with the fact that you have your own place in the universe, and that the universe itself is well-disposed toward you.  The intuitions speak of your unique and vital part in the fabric of that universe.  The intuitions know that the universe bends in your direction.  Your reasoning can deal only with results of your physical perception, however – at least with the training your societies have allowed it.  You have in fact denied your reasoning the results of important data, for you have taught it to distrust the psychic faculties.  Children’s fairy tales still carry some of that ancient knowledge.

So far, I have been speaking of Frameworks 1 and 2 separately, and I will continue to do so for your convenience and understanding.  Actually the two merge, of course, for your Framework 1 existence is immersed in Framework 2.  Again, your body itself is constantly replenished in Framework 1 because of its simultaneous reality in Framework 2.  Framework 2 is ever exteriorizing itself, appearing in your experience as Framework 1.  You concentrate so thoroughly upon exterior reality, however, that you often ignore the quite apparent deeper sources of your own physical existence.  As a result, you deal with methods of division and categorization so completely that you lose sight of associative organizations, even though you use them constantly in your own most intimate thought processes.

Session 824

Mass Events, Session 824

In connection with the creation of the universe, and with the creation of public and private events alike, let us for a moment consider a different kind of myth.

Tonight, during a pleasant supper time, our friends Ruburt and Joseph watched a television production based upon the Cinderella fairy tale.  According to the definition I gave earlier, this fairy tale is a myth.  Surely it may seem that such a children’s tale has little to do with any serious adult discussion concerning anything so profound as the creation of the known world.  And most certainly, it may appear, no scientifically pertinent data about the nature of events can possibly be uncovered from such a source.

For one thing, [the] Cinderella [tale] has a happy ending, of course, and is therefore highly unrealistic (with irony), according to many educators, since it does not properly prepare children for life’s necessary disappointments.  Fairy godmothers are definitely a thing of the storyteller’s imagination, and many serious, earnest adults will tell you that daydreaming or wishing will get you nowhere.

In the Cinderella story, however, the heroine, though poor and of low estate, manages to attain a fulfilling and seemingly impossible goal.  Her desire to attend a spectacular ball, and meet the prince, initiates a series of magical events, none following the dictates of logic.  The fairy godmother, suddenly appearing, uses the normal objects of everyday life so that they are suddenly transformed, and we have a chariot from a pumpkin, and other transformation of a like nature.

The tale has always appealed to children because they recognize the validity behind it.  The fairy godmother is a creative personification of the personalized elements in Framework 2 – a personification therefore of the inner ego, that rises to the aid of the mortal self to grant its desires, even when the intents of the mortal self may not seem to fit into the practical framework of normal life.  When the inner ego responds in such a fashion, even the commonplace, ordinary, seemingly innocuous circumstances, suddenly become charged with a new vitality, and appear to “work for” the individual involved.  If you are reading this book you are already too old to clearly remember the constant fantasies of your early childhood.  Children however know quite well, automatically, that they have a strong hand in the creation of the events that then seem to happen to them.

They experiment very often, and quite secretly, since their elders are at the same time trying to make the children conform to a given concrete reality that is more or less already mass-produced for them.

Children experiment with the creation of joyful and frightening events, trying to ascertain for themselves the nature of their control over their own experience.  They imagine joyful and terrifying experiences.  They are in fact fascinated by the effects that their thoughts, feelings, and purposes have upon daily events.  This is a natural learning process.  If they create “bogeymen”, then they can cause them to disappear also.  If their thoughts can cause them to become ill, then there is no real reason for them to fear illness, for it is their own creation.  This learning process is nipped in the bud, however.  By the time you are adults, it certainly seems that you are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of your lives.

The tale of Cinderella becomes a fantasy, a delusion or even a story about sexual awakening, in Freudian terms.  The disappointments you have faced indeed make such a tale seem to be a direct contradiction to life’s realities.  To some extent or another, however, the child in you remembers a certain sense of mastery only half realized, of power nearly grasped, then seemingly lost forever – and a dimension of existence in which dreams quite literally came true.  The child in you sensed more, of course: It sensed its own greater reality in another framework entirely, from which it had only lately emerged – yet with which it was intimately connected.  It felt itself surrounded, then, by the greater realities of Framework 2.

The child knew “that it came from somewhere else” – not by chance but by design.  The child knew that in one way or another its most intimate thoughts, dreams, and gestures were as connected with the natural world as blades of grass are to a field.  The child knew it was a unique and utterly original event or being that on the one hand was its own focus, and that on the other hand belonged to its own time and season.  In fact, children let little escape them, so that, again, they experiment constantly in an effort to discover not only the effect of their thoughts and intents and wishes upon others, but the degree to which others influence their own behavior.  To that extent, they deal rather directly with probabilities in a way quite foreign to adult behavior.

In a fashion, they make quicker deductions than adults, and often truer ones, because they are not conditioned by a past of structured memory.  Their subjective experience then brings them in rather direct contact with the methods by which events are formed.

Children understand the importance of symbols, and they use them constantly to protect themselves – not from their own reality but from the adult world.  They constantly pretend, and they quickly learn that persistent pretending in any one area will result in a physically-experienced version of the imagined activity.  They also realize that they do not possess full freedom, either, for certain pretended situations will happen in less faithful versions than the imagined ones.  Others will seem almost entirely blocked, and never materialize.

Before children are acquainted with conventional ideas of guilt and punishment, they realize that it is easier to bring about good events, through wishing, than it is to bring about unhappy ones.  The child carries with him [or her] the impetus and supporting energy provided him at birth from Framework 2, and he knows intuitively that desires conducive to his development “happen” easier than those that are not.  His natural impulses naturally lead him toward the development of his body and mind, and he is aware of a cushioning effect and support as he acts in accordance with those inner impulses.  The child is innately honest.  When he gets sick he intuitively knows the reason why, and he knows quite well that he brought about the illness.

Parents and physicians believe, instead, that the child is a victim, ill for no personal reason, but indisposed because of elements attacking him – either the outside environment, or [something] working against him from within.  The child may be told: “You have a cold because you got your feet wet”.  Or: “You caught the cold from Johnny or Sally”.  He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his body itself was invaded despite his will.  He learns that such beliefs are acceptable.  It is easier to go along than to be honest, particularly when honesty would often involve a kind of communication his parents might frown upon, or the expression of emotions that are quite unacceptable.

Mother’s little man or brave little girl can then stay at home, for example, courageously bearing up under an illness, with his or her behavior condoned.  The child may know that the illness is the result of feelings that the parents would consider quite cowardly, or otherwise involves emotional realities that the parents simply would not understand.  Gradually it becomes easier for the child to accept the parent’s assessment of the situation.  Little by little the fine relationship, the precise connections between psychological feelings and bodily reality, erode.

I do not want to oversimplify, and throughout this book we will add other elaborations upon such behavior.  The child who gets the mumps with a large number of classmates, however, knows he has his private reasons for joining into such a mass biological reality, and usually the adult who “falls prey” to a flu epidemic has little conscious awareness of his own reasons for such a situation.  He does not understand the mass suggestions involved, or his own reasons for accepting them.  He is usually convinced instead that his body has been invaded by a virus despite his own personal approval or disapproval.  He is therefore a victim, and his sense of personal power is eroded.

When a person recovers from such an ordeal, he [or she] usually grants his recovery to be the result of the medication he has been given.  Or he may think that he was simply lucky – but he does not grant himself to have any real power in such an affair.  The recovery seems to occur to him, as the illness seemed to happen to him.  Usually the patient cannot see that he brought about his own recovery, and was responsible for it, because he cannot admit that his own intents were responsible for his own illness.  He cannot learn from his own experience, then, and each bout of illness will appear largely incomprehensible.

Some years ago, before our sessions actually began (in late 1963) – though immediately previous – Ruburt (Jane) had an experience that he has described in his own books.

The event resulted in a scribbled manuscript unpublished, called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.  His desire and intense intent to understand more of the nature of reality triggered the production of that fragmentary automatic manuscript.  He found himself as a young adult, at the time of the President Kennedy assassination, in a world that seemed to have no meaning.  At the same time, while conditioned by the beliefs of his generation – beliefs that still tinge our times – he held on to one supporting belief never completely lost from childhood.

His belief, illogical as it sounded when spoken, contradictory as it seemed when applied to daily life, stated that the individual somehow could perceive the nature of reality on his or her own by virtue of innate capacities that belonged to the individual by right – capacities that were a part of man’s heritage.  In other words, Ruburt felt that there was a slim chance of opening doors of knowledge that had been closed, and he decided to take that chance.

The results, appearing initially in that now-yellowed handwritten script, made him initially see that he had chosen the events of his life in one way or another, and that each person was not the victim but the creator of those events that were privately experienced or jointly encountered with others.

In that literally power-packed few hours, he also knew that the physical senses did not so much perceive concrete phenomena, but actually had a hand in the creation of events that were then perceived as actual.