Session 899

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 899

While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed.  They did not have to operate under the law of gravity.  Men could wander as they wished about the landscape.  They did not identify themselves to any great degree as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures.  They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.

The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course it had set itself upon.  This awakening, again, happened spontaneously, and yet with its own order.  In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.  The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality.

The plants awakened before the animals – and there are reasons for these varying degrees of “wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of specieshood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness.  Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically effective world.

Again, the environment as you think of it is composed of living consciousness.  Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory.  Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what you think of as nature – the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land.  The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.

In a manner of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a manner of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface.  And in a manner of speaking, again, man becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his own thoughts, man in his way specializes in the conscious work of the world – a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him.  And when he thinks, man thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and the molecules, for the smallest particles within his being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.

Man thinks as naturally as the birds fly.  He looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes – but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.

What was it like when man awakened from the dream world?

CHAPTER 5: The “Garden of Eden”.  Man “Loses” His Dream Body and Gains A “Soul”

The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature.  He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him.  He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements – a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws.  He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place.  He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially shattering.  Yet [man] is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective.  He is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts.  He will grow the flower of the intellect – a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.

But man looked and felt himself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness.  Now he must find food, where before his dream body did not need physical nourishment.  Before, man had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality.  Man has to physically procreate.  Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division.  By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and Eve version of events.

On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality – a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree immersed.  Man’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that you now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity, the full capacity for the development of language – a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman, say, as it is in any man on a modern street.

But if man felt suddenly alone and isolated, he was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures.  Each creature apart from himself was a new mystery.  He was enchanted also by his own subjective reality, the body in which he found himself, and by the differences between himself and others like him, and the other creatures.  He instantly began to explore, to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his attention.

In a fashion, it was a great creative and yet cosmic game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness, but I want to emphasize that each version of All That Is is unique.  Each has its purpose, though that purpose cannot be easily defined in your terms.  Many people ask, for example: “What is the purpose of my life?” Meaning: “What am I meant to do?” but the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being.  That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.

Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it.  The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can – as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing.  The dream body does not die.  It exists before and after physical death.  In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms, but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived – and so, although they saw the picture of death, they did not recognize it as the death that to many people now seems an inevitable end.

[Men] saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue.  They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey”, seeing that each animal contributed so that the physical form of the earth could continue – but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men knew was its true form.  When man “awakened” in his physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside.  He retained memory of his earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he could now and then recapture that knowledge.  He became more and more aware of his physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant, and some were not.  Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

Basically, what made him feel good was good.  He was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him toward his own greatest development, to his own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he also helped to bring about the highest potentials of all of the other species of consciousness.  His natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him in just such a direction, so that he sought what was the best for himself and for others.