Session 898

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 898

The waking state as you think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of your awareness, just as your physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.

The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to you in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.

When you examine the state of dreams, however, you do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality.  You try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are your usual criteria for judging events.  Therefore, you are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when you “come awake” within your dreams – a matter we will discuss later on in this book.  But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that your own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization.  You think your thoughts and you dream your dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.

Also, in a manner of speaking, you are yourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed your world into being.  You must understand that I am not saying that you are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that you are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment – inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves.  Spontaneity knows its own order.

I have said that many times.  The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward.  In that regard, again, your dreaming state presents you with many clues about the source of your own lives and that of your world.

Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses.  Nor can any amount of information “possessed” by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument.  The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing.  It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream.  In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated.  It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.

You are subjectively “alive” before your birth.  You will be subjectively alive after your death.  Your subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that you call the waking one, in which you recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates.  Your greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe.  You create lives for yourselves, changing them as you go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots.  The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which creativity happens.  The processes occur at another level of consciousness.

In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into the physical one – and those processes happen at another level of consciousness.

Aside: Body Consciousness

Your body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal.  Mitzi running up and down the [cellar] stairs, is an example of the love of excitement and activity with which man and animals are innately endowed.  Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, and loved.  They react in their own ways to suggestion, and in that regard your body consciousness responds to your conscious treatment of it.  Think of your body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal … Animals and your own body consciousness have little concept of age.  In a fashion almost impossible to describe, [those] consciousnesses – of the body and the animals – are ‘young’ in each moment of their existences.  I am taking it for granted that you understand that I am referring to the ‘mental attitude’ of animals and of the body consciousness, for they do possess their own mental attributes – psychological colorations – and above all, emotional ‘states’.