Session 834

Mass Events, Session 834

About the material, and allied matters.

As I have often said, there are concepts most difficult to explain, for often in your frame of reference certain concepts, quite valid, can appear contradictory so that one will seem to invalidate the other.

I try to strongly state the pristine uniqueness of the individual.  I also say that there are no limitations to the self.  The two statements can appear to be contradictory.  When you are a child, your sense of identity does not include old age in usual experience.  When you are an old person, you do not identify yourself as a child.  Your sense of identity, then, changes physically through the years.  In a way it seems that you add on to yourself through experience, becoming “more than you were before”.  You move in and out of probable selfhoods, while at the same time – usually with the greatest of ease – you maintain an identity of yourself.  The mosaics of consciousness are brilliant to behold.

When I speak of mosaics, you might think of small segments, shining and of different shapes and sizes.  Yet the mosaics of consciousness are more like lights, radiating through themselves and through a million spectrums.

The infant sees mental images before birth, before the eyes are open.  Your memory, it seems, is your own – yet I have told you that you have a history of other existences.  You remember other faces, even though the mind you call the conscious one may not recognize the images from that deep inner memory.  It must often clothe them in fantasy.  You are yourself. Your self is secure in its own identity, unique in its characteristics, meeting life and the seasons in a way that has never happened before, and will never happen again – yet still you are a unique version of your greater self.  You share in certain overall patterns that are in themselves original.

It is as if you shared, say, a psychological planet, populated by people who had the same roots, the same ground of being – and as if you shared the same continents, mountains, and oceans.  Instead you share certain patterns of development, images, memories, and desires.  These are reflected in your physical life, and in one way or another elements of your life are shared in the same fashion.

Aside to Rob

Your [painted] faces represent such a recognition.  You always thought that your artistic talent should be enough.  You thought that it should be your consuming passion, but you never felt that it was – for it was you would have followed it undeviatingly.  For you, painting had to be wedded to a deeper kind of understanding.  Painting was even to be a teacher, leading your through and beyond images, and back to them again.

Your painting was meant to bring out from the recesses of your being the accumulation of your knowledge in the form of images – not of people you might meet now on the street, but portraits of the residents of the mind.  The residents of the mind are very real.  In a certain fashion, they are your parents more than your parents were, and when you express their realities, they are also expressing yours.  All time is simultaneous.  Only the illusion of time on each of your parts keeps you from greeting each other.  To some extent, when you paint such portraits you are forming psychic bridges between yourself and those other selves: Your own identity as yourself grows.

Only in a manner of speaking, there are certain “power selves”, or personalities; parts of your greater identity who utilized fairly extraordinary amounts of energy in very constructive ways.  That energy is also a part of your personality – and as you paint such images you will undoubtedly feel some considerable bursts of ambition, and even exuberance.  The feelings will allow you to identify the images of such personalities.

… The paint brush can indeed by a key to other worlds, of course.  Your own emotional feelings carry over in such paintings.

By all means encourage the dream activity and there will be a correspondence between your dreams, your painting and your writing.  Each one encourages the others.  Your writing gains vitality from your painting, your painting from your writing – and the dreaming self at one time or another is in contact with all other Aspects of your reality.

Back to Dictation

If you cannot trust your private self, then you will not trust yourself in your relationships with others or in society.

If you do not trust your private self, you will be afraid of power, for you will fear that you are bound to misuse it.  You may then purposefully put yourself in a position of weakness, while all of the time claiming that you seek influence.  Not understanding yourself, you will be in a quandary, and the mechanics of experience will appear mysterious and capricious.

There are certain situations, however, in which those mechanics can be clearly seen, and so let us examine such circumstances.  A few that I discuss may be exaggerated, in that they are not “normal” conditions in most people’s lives.  Their rather bizarre nature, however, throws a giant spotlight upon intents, purposes, and cross-purposes, that too often appear in the lives of quite normal men and women.

When people are convinced that the self is untrustworthy, for whatever reasons, or that the universe is not safe, then instead of luxuriating in the use of their abilities, exploring the physical and mental environments, they begin to pull in their realities – to contract their abilities, to over control their environments.  They become frightened people – and frightened people do not want freedom, mental or physical.  They want shelter, a definite set of rules.  They want to be told what is good and bad.  They lean toward compulsive behavior patterns.  They seek out leaders – potential, scientific, or religious – who will order their lives for them.

In the next portion of this book we will discuss people who are frightened of themselves, then, and the roles that they seek in private and social behavior.  To some extent we will be discussing closed environments, whether mental or physical, in which questioning becomes taboo and dangerous.  Such environments may be private, as in the case of persons with what are generally called mental disorders, or they may be shared by many, in – for example – mass paranoia.