The Way Toward Health - January 16, 1984 - A Dream Interpretation

January 16, 1984

(This session interprets the following dream experiences of Jane:

(Jane began by finding herself as a young girl on a swing at the recreation field across the street from St Clement’s Catholic Church and School in Saratoga Springs, where she grew up.  “I looked down and saw that I wore black shoes and white socks, like little kids do, like I look in some of those old photographs”.  At one time, here she thought she was only four years old.  She knew she was doing those things while at the field, she said.

(Then she found herself in a tub of warm water, and she was filled with sexual sensual feelings, especially in the vaginal area.  “I suddenly realized I was hallucinating the water and stuff, that I was really in my hospital bed.  Then I thought that anyway, I could have a kitten here.  We have two rooms and Rob could hide the kitten, and keep a litter box hidden too – how I didn’t know.”

(Next, Jane said she was trying to find a radio and recorder here at our hill house in Elmira so that Sue Watkins, who lives an hour’s drive to the north, could borrow it.  While searching she suddenly found a lot of cubbyholes filled with trinkets that she knew were all hers, and she was very pleased at this knowledge”.  She found herself inside something like a boxcar that was also the inside chassis of a cassette-playing machine.  In this chassis, Jane and Sue were going up and down and around beautiful, jewel-like green hills.  “It was fantastic.”  Then like a rising sun Jane saw her own enormous face looking down at it all – the jewel colors, Sue and herself, the vehicle.

(Jane didn’t actually see Sue during the experience – she just knew Sue was there, talking to her.  Then the trip “got much less clear”, and she was trying to figure out what to lend Sue.  She can’t remember. … )

Ruburt displayed an excellent example of the mobility of consciousness in last evening’s experiences.

Healing also takes place at many different levels of consciousness.  Ruburt’s experience, all in all, touched many if those levels, facilitating the healing process at each given level.  The “boxcar” episode represented his living at one level of physical experience, even while he also existed as the giant-sized self that peered over the mountain top and watched his progress.  An excellent portrayal – or portrait – of the infinite inner self watching and guiding the physical self’s existence.

The sexual aspects of the earlier episode indeed represented the toning-up of the sexual capacities and their pleasurable aspects.  In the very early episode, Ruburt experienced the healthy and joyful child’s body, with its innocent spontaneity.  This allowed him to come into touch with childhood’s early vitality – and in a sensual manner, not just, say, as a memory.

The excellent glowing colors also helped remind him of the eyes’ ability to perceive bright hues, and so activated the nerves and muscles of the eyes, reminding them of their natural capabilities.

The boxcar elements, beside the explanation already given, also represented the body as a vehicle, moving easily and swiftly.  The entire episode shows the way that the mind derives new experience through using more than one level of consciousness at any given time.  And the small trinkets that Ruburt discovered to his own delight represented the small but very valuable pleasures of daily life that he is now reclaiming.

Now, I may or may not return, again according to those rhythms of which I speak – but know that I am present and approachable.

(“What’s the connection with Jane finding herself inside a recorder?  And with Sue?  Sue wrote the two-volume Conversations With Seth.)

Sue represents a certain portion of Ruburt – the writing self, signifying that the “psychic” portions of Ruburt’s personality were helping out the writing portions, and letting them share in the psychic knowledge and experience.

The Way Toward Health: January 13, 1984 Time and Dementia

January 13, 1984

Apropos of our discussion concerning time.

The nature of universal creativity is so remarkable that its true reaches are literally beyond most understanding.  The implications are staggering – so that the affair is almost impossible to explain.

The past, and every moment of the past, are being constantly changed from the operation point of the present.  In your terms, the present becomes the past, which is again changed at every conceivable point from the latest-present.  Yet through all of this immense, continuous creation, there is always a personal sense of continuity: You never really lose your way in the distance between one moment and the next.

In somewhat of the same fashion the objects about you are constantly in motion, as you know.  The atoms and molecules are forever moving, and in a way the electrons are the directors of that motion.

Your focus is so precisely and finely tuned that despite all of that activity, objects appear solid.  Now objects are also events, and perhaps that is the easiest way to understand them.  They are highly dependent upon your own subjective focus.  Let that focus falter for a briefest amount of time, and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down, so to speak.

Remember that you are also objects, and also events, and as physical bodies your organs are composed of atoms and molecules whose motion, again, is directed by the electrons.

The electrons themselves have their own subjective lives.  They are also subjective events, therefore, so there is always a correlation between those electrons in your bodies and those in the objects you see about you.  Nevertheless again, subjective continuity itself never falters, in that it is always a part of the world that it perceives, so that you and the world create each other, in those terms.

When you change the past from each point of the latest-present, you are also changing events at the most microscopic levels.  Your intent has also an electronic reality, therefore.  It is almost as if your thoughts punched the keys of some massive computer, for your thoughts do indeed have a force.  Even as sentences are composed of words, there is no end to the number of sentences that can be spoken – so “time” is composed of an endless variety of electronic languages that can “speak” a million worlds instead of words.

Now I may or may not return, according to those rhythms of which I speak, but know that I am “present” and approachable.

Aside: An Example of Dementia

Dates are but designations applied to the days.

Mankind lived without such designations for a much longer period that he has used them.  Animals, without such designations, still know their position on the planet itself, and they are aware of the tides and the movement of the earth and planets.

Karina (another patient at the hospital) has that same kind of orientation.  At this point in her life, she has actually refused to concentrate upon languages, which would tend to tie her more tightly to the details of the world.  She does “return to the past”, remaking it more to her liking.  Her latest-present is beginning to show signs of a deterioration.  She wants a turning-off point from which to construct other realities, so it is not so much that the latest-present is deteriorating as much as the fact that she is purposely letting her attention wander, and allowing the latest-presents to diminish in strength and vitality.  She will of course construct a new form from which to operate.

The Way Toward Health - January 11 and 12, 1984

January 11, 1984

Your situations can be called extreme – but true extremes are far less fortunate.  You have, for example, the extremes of poverty suffered by people in many other parts of the world – a poverty that stunts all kinds of growth, mental and physical, and brings about an early death.  Or the extremes of disease, in which children are born without all the faculties needed for life, and – therefore also die an early death.  Or those extremes when entire families suffer patterns of tragedy so whole numbers are wiped out at one time.

There are reasons for such cases, of course.  I simply wanted you to know that many very severe extremes exist, that would make your lives seem most favorable in contrast.  Since you both have such mental agility and a history in this life of health and vitality, that history can be used by Ruburt, if he recalls himself running up and down the steps of the art gallery, for example.  His mind and body both must recognize the validity of those motions, so that there should be no contradictory material to block it.

The mental exercise of seeing himself vigorously cleaning the apartments at 458 (where we used to live on W. Water Street), or the rooms at the hill house (where we live now), can also be used most advantageously.

I may or may not return, again according to those rhythms of which I speak – but know that I am present and approachable.

January 12, 1984

It may be far more pleasant to be good-humored all of the time – but in Ruburt’s situation the fairly infrequent periods of blueness do indeed operate therapeutically, so that he is able to express those feelings through tears, and therefore relieve the body of expressing the same feelings through additional symptoms.

There is a certain residue, in other words of fairly desolate feelings – and these are working themselves out through such expression, thus freeing the body for additional improvements.  He progresses at a certain rate, for example, and encounters some blockages, due to doubts and fears.  These are then released and expressed through tears or through a recognized period of blueness.  Then the system is cleared again, and the way clear for more improvements.

In the past, the body itself was depressed, running at low gear, and this is certainly not the case now.  Each time, of course, the period of blueness is briefer, the system cleared more quickly, and the new improvements also show themselves at a quicker rate.

This is now, at least, a natural casting-off of old doubts and fears, but in such a way that they are recognized and then let go.

The changing condition of the eyes shows the kind of cycles that occur: the upper edges, so to speak, of improvements continue, so that each new improvement is, obviously, superior to the last.  But in the meantime, there is much variation, unevenness, and times when the vision is quite unclear.  Those changes do indeed seem mysterious.  Ruburt is not looking at his own eyes all of the time – so that mysteriousness is somehow taken for granted.  He understands so little about the eye’s operation to begin with, that he does not bother to figure out, or try to figure out, the order that such improvements should take, or how they should happen.

The right leg is immediately before his vision, however – it is highly visible, so that he often compares its position unfavorably with that of the other leg.  This is bound to lead him to consider those impediments that seem to be in the way.  The body can heal the leg as easily as it can heal the eyes, and as easily as it can heal the bedsores.

It is a good idea for now not to concentrate upon that leg, or what it must do eventually in order for walking to take place.  It might help if now and then he imagines his walking taking place as easily and naturally as his thoughts come and go, and in ways as mysterious as the way his vision operates, when it is suddenly clearer, and he reads so much more quickly – for the quick reading will soon be the norm.

It is indeed a step forward that he looked in the mirror today – a very important issue – and so is your suggestion that he do so briefly every day – and smiles.

It shows he is ready to encounter himself, and at least willing to look kindly upon himself.  Of course, the lipstick is an excellent idea, and the eyebrow pencil, so that he begins to care for his face as he used to.  The face’s expression accurately reflects the inner self-image, as odd as it may seem.  A smile, even when he does not feel like smiling, builds up the self-image, and affects the entire bodily condition.

Ruburt has already been healed of conditions quite as complicated as the leg that was broken.

I may or may not return – but know indeed that I am present and approachable, and that I hold both of you in my attention.

(“Do you want to say something about our discussion yesterday, about changing the past from the present?”)

It is very difficult to explain, because what actually happens is sometimes so directly contrary to what seems to have happened.  You do not simply change, or enlarge, your ideas or beliefs about the past – but you change the events of the past themselves for yourself, and sometimes for other also.

It might help if you remember that despite appearances all events are basically subjective.  Their “objectivity” happens at a certain point of focus, and as that focus changes, so do the events.

The Way Toward Health - Session January 10, 1984

January 10, 1984

There are many, many species that man has not discovered, in all the categories of life – insects and onward.

There are multitudinous species of viruses and so forth that man has not encountered and recognized, and there are connections between viruses and other species of living matter that remain unknown.  There are indeed two different kinds of upward-walking mammals, much like your own species, but much larger, and with infinitely keener senses.  They are indeed amazingly swift creatures, and through scent alone they are aware of the presence of man when any member of your species is at all in the immediate area – standing, say, at least several miles away.  Vegetable matter is a main diet, though often supplemented by insects, which are considered a delicacy.

They have, for that matter, devised many ingenious insect traps, so that hundreds or more can be caught, for many are needed since insects are so small.  These traps are often constructed on trees, in the bark, in such a fashion that the tree gum itself is used to trap the insects.  The traps appear to be part of the tree itself, so as to protect them.

These creatures do indeed remember, but their remembering operates extremely rapidly – a kind of almost instantaneous deduction that comes as sense data is interpreted.  That is, received and interpreted almost at once, or simultaneously.

Offspring do not occur until the individuals are well past the age that you would consider normal for breeding.  Otherwise the procedure is the same.  With some territorial variation, such creatures reside in many of the world areas on your planet, though their overall population is very small – altogether, perhaps, several thousand.  They rarely congregate in large groups, but do have a family and tribal-like organization, with at the very most twelve adults in any given area.  As offspring are added, the groups break up again, for they know well that in larger numbers they would be much more easy to discover.

They all use tools of one kind or another, and live indeed in close concord with the animals.  There is no competition between them and animals, for example, and they are not basically aggressive, though they could be extremely dangerous if they were cornered, or if their young were attached.

They grow quite sluggish in wintertime, in very cold climates, and their temperature drops, as is characteristic of hibernating animals, except that their temperature is more sensitive to daily variations, so that on some winter days they can forage for food very well, while on the other hand they may hibernate for even weeks on end.

The have a keen understanding of nature, and of natural phenomena.  Language is not developed to any great degree, for their sensual ordinary equipment is so pure and swift that it almost becomes a language of its own, and does not need any elaboration.  Those senses possess their own variances, so that without any word such as “now” or “then”, the creatures are able to know quite accurately how many living creatures are in the vicinity, how long they have been there – and their experience with time is one that follows the seasons in such a way that they have formed a wordless, fairly accurate picture of the world, including navigational direction.

I am mentioning this material because of the program you saw today, and also because I knew of your interest.

… Your dream about the return to Sayre, and the more spacious surroundings, means also that as you now change the past and the future, so you have changed the past: you view it in a more extended light, so that it becomes less narrow and constricting.  Then from that new past, in certain terms, the new present and future emerge – a fascinating phenomenon.

Now, I may or may not return, according to those reasons with which you are beginning to grow acquainted, but know that I am present and approachable.

The Way Toward Health, Session January 9, 1984

January 9, 1984

Exuberance and a sense of vitality are always present to some degree or another.

Some people are always aware of their own joy regardless of circumstances.  They feel safe and protected even when the events of their lives do not seem favorable.  Regardless of their own doubts and worries, such people feel themselves supported, and feel that in the end everything will work to their advantage.  Many other people, however, lose this sense of safety and abundance, and it may seem as if joy in living was an attribute only of the young.

Exuberance and joy, however, basically have nothing to do with time or age.  They may be expressed as vividly and beautifully at the age of 80 as at the age of 8.  For whole segments of the population, however, it seems as if joy and health are fleeting attributes expressed briefly in childhood, and then lost forever.

There are innumerable ways of reclaiming joy in living, however, and in so doing physical health may be reclaimed by those who have found it lacking in their experience.

The quality of life is intensely important, and is to a large extent dependent upon a sense of well-being and self-confidence.  While these attributes are expressed in the body, they also exist in the mind, and there are some cumbersome mental beliefs that may severely impede mental and physical well-being.

We will not concentrate upon these, but we will indeed discuss them, so that each person can understand the relationship between poor beliefs and poor health, for through understanding these connections the individual can re-experience the great mental variety that is possible.  No individual is helpless, for example, in the face of negative beliefs.  He or she can learn to make choices once again, and thus to choose positive concepts, so that they become as natural as negative beliefs once did.

One of the greatest detriments to mental and physical well-being is the unfortunate belief that any unfavorable situation is bound to get worse instead of better.  That concept holds that any illness will worsen, any war will lead to destruction, that any and all known dangers will be encountered, and basically that the end result of mankind’s existence is extinction.  All of those beliefs impede mental and physical health, erode the individual’s sense of joy and natural safety, and force the individual to feel like an unfortunate victim of exterior events that seem to happen despite his own will or intent.

The ideas I have just mentioned are all prominent in your society, and now and then they return to darken your senses of joy and expectation.

Today Ruburt experienced a small-enough, but still potent enough, recurrence of those ideas.  It is very important that they be recognized when they appear.  For now, often that recognition alone can clear your thoughts and mind.

You (Rob) had your own experiences last evening: your foreknowledge of your friend’s phone call, and the unorthodox knowledge about the money – and those two events happened because you did indeed want another small assurance of the mind’s capabilities despite the official concepts of the mind, by which you are so often surrounded.

Such experiences let you taste, again, the feeling of your own greater abilities and freedom.  Tell Ruburt to remind himself again that he is free to move and to walk normally.

(“You’re saying that to some extent at least, he still feels that he isn’t free to move and walk?  I’ve thought of this several times myself lately.”)

I am saying that to varying degrees those concepts sometimes return, that it should be obvious that this happens less and less.  Remind him also to remember that he does not have any particular disease.  Society would be much better off if man labeled multitudinous levels of physical health rather than dignifying negative concepts by giving them names and designations.

Now, I may or may not return, again according to those rhythms of which I speak – but know that I am present and approachable.

The Way Toward Health Jan 6 and 7, 1984

January 6, 1984

The idea of the sinful self will not be predominant in our own book, but we certainly will delve into the many unfavorable concepts that are held by the various religions – concepts that certainly make many people feel that the self is indeed sinful rather than blessed.

The self is indeed blessed, and just the reminder of that fact can often short-circuit negative beliefs, particularly if they are not too deep-seated.

As far as Ruburt’s motions are concerned, the body is following its own rhythms, which will sometimes involve overt, noticeable exercise and activity on the one hand, while on the other it exercises internally, so to speak, making all preparations for the other later exercises and motion.  It seemed, for example, sudden when Ruburt fed himself, even if briefly, but that exterior improvement followed many inner manipulations, which until then had not connected in that particular manner.

Reading some of the earlier sessions of this sequence also serves to remind you both of the progress that has taken place since those sessions began, and therefore invite even newer improvements.

I may or may not return, again according to those rhythms, but know that I am indeed, once more, present and approachable.

January 7, 1984

The body consciousness, on its own, is filled with exuberance, vitality, and creativity.

Each most microscopic portion of the body is conscious, strives toward its own goals of development, and is in communication with all other parts of the body.

The body consciousness is indeed independent.  To a large degree its own defense mechanisms protect it from the mind’s negative beliefs – at least to a large extent.  As I have mentioned before, almost all persons pass from a so-called disease state back into healthy states without ever being aware of the alterations.  In those cases, the body consciousness operates unimpeded by negative expectations or concepts.

When those negative considerations are multiplied, however, when they harden, so to speak, then they do indeed begin to diminish the body’s own natural capacity to heal itself, and to maintain that overall, priceless organization that should maintain it in a condition of excellent strength and vitality.

There are also occasions when the body consciousness itself rises up in spite of a person’s fears and doubts, and throws aside a condition of illness in a kind of sudden victory.  Even then, however, the person involved has already begun to question such negative beliefs.  The individual may not know how to cast them off, even though he or she desires to do so.  It is in those instances that the body consciousness arises and throws off its shackles.

With free will, however, it is not possible for the body consciousness to be given full and clear dominion, for that would deny large areas of choices, and cut off facets of learning.  The main direction and portent, however, of the body consciousness on its own is always toward health, expression, and fulfillment.

The molecules, and even the smaller aspects of the body act and react, communicate, cooperate with each other, and share each other’s knowledge, so that one particle of the body knows what is happening in all other parts.  Thus, the amazing organization usually works in a smooth, natural fashion.  Many body events that you think of in your society as negative – certain viruses, for example – are instead meant as self-corrective devices, even as fever actually promotes health rather than impedes it.

The main characteristic of bodily consciousness is its spontaneity.  This allows it to work at an incredibly swift rate that could not be handled by the topmost conscious portions of the mind.  Its operation is due to an almost instantaneous kind of consciousness, in which what is known is known, with no distance between, say, the knower and the known.

The act of seeing, and all of the body’s senses, are dependent upon this inner spontaneity.

The Way Toward Health - January 5, 1984

January 5, 1984

People who have epilepsy are also afraid of their own energy.

They do not trust it, nor do they trust the spontaneous portions of the self.  They are afraid that left alone their energy might strike out against others, and so they short-circuit its use, having attacks that momentarily render themselves helpless.

People with so-called secondary personalities also fear their own energy.  They divide it up so that it seems to belong to different personalities, and is therefore effectively divided.  In basic terms, true amnesia does not exist in such cases, though it appears to.  The people involved are quite aware of their activities at all times, but they behave in a fashion that is not continual – that is, the main personality does not seem to behave in a continual manner, but is broken up, or again, seemingly divided.  This psychological ploy neatly prevents the so-called main personality from using all of its energy at any one time.

The individuals concerned pretend to themselves that they have no memory of the other personalities’ existences or activities.  These personalities, however, store up their energy so that one personality often exhibits explosive behavior, or makes certain decisions that seem to go against the wishes of the main entity.  In this way, different kinds of behavior may be exhibited, and while it would seem that many decisions are made by one portion of the self, without another portion of the self knowing anything about it, such usually is not the case.  In fact, the main personality is able to express many different kinds of probable action, but the entire personality is prevented from acting with its full energy or power.  Instead the energy is diverted into other channels.

All portions of the self are indeed conscious, and they are also basically conscious of each other, though for working purposes they may seem to be separate or isolated.

The Way Toward Health - first session

Part One: Dilemmas

Chapter One: The Purpose of this Book, and Some Important Comments About Exuberance and Health

The will to live can be compromised by doubts, fears, and rationalizations.

Some people, for example, definitely want to live, while they try to hide from life at the same time.  Obviously, this leads them into conflicts.  Such people will impede their own motions and progress.  They become overly concerned about their own safety.  If any of my readers feel this way, they may even hide these feelings from themselves.  They will concentrate upon all of the dangers present in society in their own country, or in other portions of the world, until their own frightened overall concern for safety seems to be a quite natural, rational response to conditions over which they have no control.

What is actually involved is a kind of paranoia, which can become such a powerful response that it can take over a person’s life, and color all projects.  If this has happened to any of my readers, you might recognize yourself in any number of different scenarios.  You might be a “survivalist”, setting up stores and provisions to be used in case of a nuclear disaster.  It may seem to you that you are quite justified in protecting yourself and your family from disaster.  In many such cases, however, the people so worried about the occurrence of danger from the outside world are instead concerned about the nature of their own energy, and afraid that it might destroy them.

In other words, they do not trust the energy of their own lives.  They do not trust the natural functioning of their bodies, or accept this functioning as a gift of life.  Instead they question it at every point – even holding their breath at times, waiting for something to go wrong.

Other people may actually impede those portions of the body given to mobility, so that they limp, or tighten their muscles, or otherwise tamper with their bodies so that the end result is one that requires a cautious, hesitating approach to motion.  Some may even cause themselves to have severe accidents, in which they sacrifice portions of their bodies to retain a sense of false safety.

These rather self-deceptive feelings are not hidden deeply in the subconscious mind, as you might suppose.  Instead, in the majority of cases they consist of quite conscious decisions, made at one time or another on quite surface levels.

They are not forgotten, but the people involved simply close their own eyes, so to speak, to those decisions, and pretend that they do not exist, simply to make their lives appear smooth and to save face with themselves, when they know very well that the decisions really rest on very shaky ground indeed.

I so not wish to simplify matters, but such decisions can be uncovered very easily in children.  A child might fall and badly scrape a knee – so badly that limping is the result, at least temporarily.  Such a child will often be quite conscious of the reason for the affair: he or she may openly admit the fact that the injured part was purposefully chosen so that a dreaded test at school could be missed, and the child might well think that the injury was little enough to pay for the desired effect that it produced.

An adult under the same circumstances might become injured to avoid a dreaded event at the office – but the adult may well feel ashamed of such a reaction, and so hide it from himself or herself in order to save feelings of self-esteem.  In such cases, however, the adults will feel that they are victims of events over which they have little or no control.

If the same kind of event occurs with any frequency, their fear of the world and of daily events may grow until it becomes quite unreasonable.  Still, in most such instances those inner decisions can be easily reached – but while people are determined to “save face”, they will simply refuse to accept those decisions as their own.  People will to live, to act or not to act.  To a large extent, they will the events of their lives – whether or not they are willing to admit this to themselves, and they will to die.

Aside: Application to Jane’s Situation

All of this, of course, applies to Ruburt’s situation – for once, indeed, he willed himself into immobility, willing to sacrifice certain kinds of motion in order to safely use other kinds of psychological motion, because he was afraid of his spontaneous nature, or his spontaneous self.

He was afraid that it acted according to its own reasons which might not be his own – or so he thought.  Now he is beginning to understand that his energy is the gift of his life – to be expressed, not repressed – and to understand, again, that spontaneity knows its own order.

He just told you that when he begins to speak for me he senses an entire tall structure of words, and unhesitatingly he lets that structure form.  The same is true with his ability to move and walk; the more he trusts his energy, the more his spontaneity forms its own beautiful order that results in the spontaneous physical art of walking – and he is indeed well along the way.  The changes have already begun in his mind, and they will be physically expressed.

It is not coincidence, in your language, that the word “will” refers to the future as in a line like “it will happen”, and also refers to the decision-making quality of the mind.

I may or may not return, again according to those rhythms of which I speak – but I am present and approachable.

Magical Approach Final Sessions

Session Sixteen: Jane’s Positive Results

October 6, 1980

Ruburt’s body is continuing to respond.  The legs and arms are lengthening, and becoming stronger.  He should be feeling increased quickness of motion in some respects soon.  He is doing well, concentrating upon the good moods, which have increased as a result.  And I bid you both a fond good evening.

Session Seventeen:  Jane’s Skill as Ancient as Man Is.  The Species’ Multitudinous Abilities.

October 15, 1980

Ruburt’s skill is as ancient as man is, and indeed all of your arts, sciences, and cultural achievements are the offshoots of spontaneous mental and biological processes.

I choose my words quite carefully at times, because I realize the various interpretations that can be placed upon them.  Perhaps the following explanation will express more clearly what I mean.

In the first place, as often mentioned lately, the reasoning mind is spontaneously fired.  The species contains within itself all of the necessary spontaneous attributes that are necessary to from a civilization, for example.  All of your reasoned activities – your governments, societies, arts, religions and sciences – are the physical realization, of course, of inner capacities that are inherent in man’s structure.  Take your theaters’ moving picture dramas.  These are the materialization in your time of man’s natural acting ability – a characteristic highly important in the behavior of the species.

Early man, for example, spontaneously played at acting out the part of other animals.  He took the part of a tree, a brook, a rock.  Acting became a teaching method – a way of passing on information.  Man always possessed all of the knowledge he needed.  The task was to make it physically available.

People like Ruburt translated inner knowledge in many ways – through acting it out, through singing or dancing, through drawing images on cave walls.  It was the intellect’s job to put such information to practical use, and thus the intuitions and the intellect worked hand in hand.  Man dealt then with spontaneous knowing in a more direct fashion.

It is very difficult to try to explain the various shadings of psychology that were involved.  Early man did act in a more spontaneous manner, more automatically, in your terms, but not mindlessly.  If you remember the early portions of our latest book (The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events), then this information should fall into place, for consciousness emerged from the inside outward.  Animals enjoy drama, and in their fashion, they playact.

It was left to man to translate his inner information with a free hand.  He is able to form many different kinds of cultures, for example.  He puts his sciences and religions, his languages, together in multitudinous ways, but there must always be a translation of inner information outward to the world of sense.  There still is.  Man’s capacities have not dimmed in that regard.  Thinking, for example, is as automatic as ever.  It is simply that your culture puts the various elements together in ways that stress the qualities of what you refer to as rational thinking.

When the species needs certain abilities, they rise to the fore, as in the case of Ruburt now.  When you are painting pictures, you are also translating inner knowledge.  Early artists drew pictures to share the images they saw in their dreams.  In a fashion, they practiced dreaming in their sleep, and thus learned also to think in terms of the measurement of physical images, and to move objects around in their minds before they did so physically.

Poetry was an art and a science.  It conveyed quite necessary information about man and the universe.  The same can be said of many cave drawings.  What you had – what you still have, though you are not nearly as aware of it – was an excellent give-and-take between the inner and outer senses.  Through chanting, dancing, playacting, painting, story-telling, man spontaneously translated inner sense data into physical actualization.  The physical senses only present you with clues as to your own sensitivities.

Ruburt translates what I give him without being consciously aware of receiving the material in usual terms, or of translating it.  It has to be broken down, particularly to a time frame, and then into concepts that can take advantage of the world view that is held in your culture.  Everything must be slanted to fit the viewpoint of creatures who believe most firmly in the superiority of matter over mind – who are immersed in a particular biological framework.

I cannot ignore those belief structures – or what I say would literally be incomprehensible.  All of this is automatically taken care of.

Now: The species has multitudinous abilities, each necessary, each adding to the entire fulfillment and attributes of your people.  Some individuals choose to specialize, following specific lines of abilities through many existences – accommodating these, however, to the times in which they are born.  Both of you have been speakers in that regard.  The methods may change.  You may “speak” through art or music, through trance activities, but you will specialize in the use of the inner senses, and in translating the inner knowledge of the species, bringing it to whatever level of ordinary consciousness that is considered the official one.

You know what sound is, yet as Ruburt knows, what you consider sound is only one of sound’s many spectrums.  Beside translating inner images into paintings, for example, you may unknowingly be translating sensually invisible sounds into images.  In a way quite impossible to describe, it would be true to say that our sessions actually translate multidimensional images into words.  You have no words for the kinds of images I am speaking of, for they are not objects, nor pictures of objects, nor images of images, but instead the inner dimensions, each separate and glowing, but connected, prisms of knowledge, that have within themselves more reality than you can presently begin to imagine.

To a certain extent, I must travel from those realities into your comprehension, wrest myself free in order to form an ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-on-the- move entity that can speak here and be there at the same time.  So I am distant and close at once.  That distance from you also represents the reaches, however, of the human psyche, and the vast corridors of psychological activity from which it is formed, and from which your world emerges.

For the worlds are so composed that each one is a part of each other one, and there is no disconnecting.  There is no place or space, psychological, psychic, where those worlds exist apart from each other, so you cannot say that one is more highly evolved than another.

There are as many frontiers as there ever were, and there is no catastrophe that will annihilate consciousness, or put an end to earthly life.  When you think in terms of earth’s destruction, or the ending of the world, you are thinking of course of a continuum of time, and of beginnings and endings.  From your viewpoint in space and time, it seems that planets have come and gone, stars collapsed, and when you look outward into space it appears that you look backward into time.  There are great pulsations, however, in existence – pulsations that have nothing to do with time as you understand it, but with intensities.

In the deepest of terms, the world always was and always will be.  It changes its patterns of activity, it comes and goes, but it is always itself in its comings and goings.  To me, that is exceedingly simple – but as far as your concepts are concerned, it can seem to imply irreconcilable complications.

End of session.  A small note to our friend – again – to trust the great power of the universe that forms his own image, to trust his spontaneity, and his body’s natural urges toward relaxation, motion, and creativity, as these show themselves in their own rhythms.

Magical Approach Session Fifteen

Session Fifteen: The Natural Person and the Natural Use of Time

October 1, 1980

Our friend is now feeling somewhat more ambitious of late.  A few weeks ago, he could hardly wait to lie down at the appointed times, like it otherwise or no, simply because he was so uncomfortable.

Now, things have changed somewhat.  The sharp discomfort has gone.  A few weeks ago, he barely considered taking two steps in the kitchen, much less walking twice the length of the living room, or considering walking after dinner.

The fact that he is now thinking of walking after dinner is an obvious advance.  His irritability is somewhat natural – but also based on the idea, still, that when he is laying down that is dead time, or useless time, enforced inactivity.  It would help, of course, if he reminded himself that his creative mind is at work whether or not he is aware of it, and regardless of what he is doing, and that such periods have the potential, at least, of accelerating creativity, if he allows his intellect to go into a kind of free drive at such times.  You might have him become more aware of when he actually becomes tired, or uncomfortable, so that he does lay down then.

The walking after dinner would be excellent, of course – the idea being, however, that if he became uncomfortable from sitting that he lie on the bed, perhaps before watching television for the evening.

One important point, again, is to remember that in any given day his mood is often excellent for many periods of time.  He should concentrate his attention upon those periods, rather than concentrating upon the periods when he is blue or upset, and berating himself for those reactions.

In that way, the good moods become longer.  They increase.  They become significant. In such ways, he will discover what promotes those good moods.  Later, I will have some things to say about what I will call “the daily hypothesis”, for each person has such a daily hypothesis – one that might be quite different for say, Friday than it is for Monday.  You build your daily experience partially by such working hypotheses.

To some extent Ruburt’s dissatisfaction with laying down after dinner also means that he is learning more about his own natural rhythms, for he does feel accelerated at that time, and by the evenings, as you do.  This is because many of the beliefs that you have individually and jointly are somewhat relieved in the evening, in that they so often apply to the day’s activities, when the rest of the world seems to be engaged in the nine-to-five assembly-line world experience.

You do not project as many negative ideas upon the evening hours, and the same applies to most people to varying degrees.  That is at least one of the reasons why these sessions have been held in the evening, where it was at least not as likely that you would try to invest them with the workaday kind of world values.

That is also why it is easier, generally speaking, for Ruburt to receive such information in the evening, because you are jointly free of limitations that might hamper you at other times of the day – not simply that visitors might arrive more usually then, but because you yourselves are less visited by preconceptions of what you are supposed to do in any given hour of the day.

The natural, magical flows of your own rhythms are more often broken up in the daytime.  This applies to other people as well, because of your ideas of what you should be doing at any given time, or what is socially respectable, proper, upright, even moral in limited terms.

You have settled upon a system that seems to be naturally based, the exclusive results of your historic past, one in which your main activities are daytime ones.  It seems only natural that early man, for example, carried on all of his main activities in the day, hiding after dark.  As a matter of fact, however, early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the use of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept.  He also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his senses with high accuracy – the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.

In any case, man was not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night.  It was agriculture that turned him more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.

Many people’s natural rhythms, then, still do incline in those directions, and they are always kept operable as alternate rhythms for the species as a whole.

Ruburt has some inclinations in that direction, as do many creative people, but these rhythms are often nearly completely overlaid by culturally-learned ones.  Cultures that were night-oriented appreciated the night in a different fashion, of course, and actually utilized their consciousnesses in ways that are almost nearly forgotten.  I believe there are ancient fairy tales and myths still surviving that speak of these underworlds, or worlds of darkness – but they do not mean worlds of death, as is usually interpreted.

In a fashion, the intellect goes hand-in-hand with the imagination under such conditions.  It is not that man stressed physical data less, but that he put it together differently – that in the darkness he relied upon his inner and outer senses in a more unified fashion.  The nightly portions of your personalities have become strangers to you – for as you identify with what you think of as your rational intellect, then you identify it further with the daytime hours, with the objective world that becomes visible in the morning, with the clear-cut physical objects that are then before your view.

In those times, however, man identified more with his intuitive self, and with his imagination, and these to some extent more than now, directed the uses to which he put his intellect.

This meant, of course, a language that was in its way more precise than your own, for concepts were routinely expressed that described the vast complexity of subjective as well as objective events.  There were myriad relationships, for example, impossible now to describe, between a person and his or her dream selves, and between the dream selves of all the members of the tribe.  Particularly in warmer climates, man was naturally nocturnal, and did a good deal of his sleeping and dreaming in the daytime.

You must remember, of course, that the use of clocks is a fairly recent phenomenon.  Men thought in terms of rhythms of the time, or of flowing time, not of time in sections that were arbitrary.  So as far as creaturehood is concerned, you have adapted to a time environment that you yourselves have formed.  Creative people, again, are often aware of those connections, at least at certain levels, and Ruburt in particular has always felt that way to some extent.  You have largely buried your own natural feelings in that direction.

The sessions from the beginning were based upon the natural flow of Ruburt’s energy, taking advantage of it in such a fashion.

Magical Approach Session Fourteen

Session Fourteen: The Self.  Relaxation and Effortlessness.

September 29, 1980

It is not true, of course, that before the time of modern psychology man had a concept of himself that dealt with conscious exterior aspects only, although it has been written that until that time man thought of himself as a kind of flat-surfaced self – minus, for example, subconscious or unconscious complexity.

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man used the word “soul” to include his own entire complexity.  That word was large enough to contain man’s experience.  It was large enough to provide room for conventional and unconventional, bizarre and ordinary states of mind and experience.  It was roomy enough to hold images of reality that were physically perceived or psychologically perceived.

Now the church finally placed all of the condemnation of its religious laws against certain psychological and mystical experiences – not because it did not consider them realities, of course, but precisely because it recognized too well the disruptive influence that, say, revelationary experience could have upon a world order that was based upon a uniform dogma.

“Witches” were not considered insane, for example, or deranged, for their psychological beliefs fit in only too well with those of the general populace.  They were considered evil instead.  The vast range of psychological expression, however, had some kind of framework to contain it.  The saint and the sinner each had access to great depths of possible heroism or despair.  Psychological reality, for all of the religious dangers placed upon it, was anything but a flat-surfaced experience.  It was in fact because the church so believed in the great range of psychological activity possible that it was so dogmatic and tireless in trying to maintain order.

Unfortunately, with the development of the scientific era, a development occurred that need not have happened.  As I have mentioned before, science’s determination to be objective almost immediately brought about a certain artificial shrinking of psychological reality.  What could not be proven in the laboratory was presumed not to exist at all.

Anyone who experienced “something that could not exist” was therefore to some extent or another deluded or deranged.  There is no doubt that the accepted dimensions of psychological reality began to shrink precisely at the time that modern psychology began.  Modern psychology was an attempt to make man conform to the new scientific world view.

It was an attempt to fit man within the picture of evolution, and to manufacture a creature whose very existence was somehow pitted against itself.  Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul.  It had to have hidden in its psychological roots the bloody remnants of the struggle for survival that now cast it in its uneasy role.  There is no doubt that the church cast the soul in a position of stress, caught as it was between its heavenly source and original sin – but there was a sense of psychological mobility involved, one that saw continued existence after death.

The new psychology shut off mobility after death, while giving each individual an unsavory primitive past heritage – a heritage genetically carried, that led finally to the grave.  Psychological activity was scaled down in between life and death, then, even while the possibility of any after-death experience was considered the most unreasonable and unintellectual of speculations.

Any man might rise in your democracy from a poor peasant’s son to be the President.  Outcasts might become the socially prominent.  The unlettered might become highly educated.  The idea of achieving greatness, however, was considered highly suspect.  The self was kept in bounds.  Great passion, or desire or intent – or genius – did not fit the picture.

Now some peoples would not fit into that mold.  They would take what they could from your technology, but in conscious and spontaneous ways they retaliated – and still do – by exaggerating all of those human tendencies that your society has held down so well.  If you can have reason without faith, then indeed, for example, you will see that there can be faith without reason.  When human experience becomes shrunken in such a fashion – compressed – then in a fashion it also explodes at both ends, you might say.

You have atrocious acts committed, along with great heroisms, but each are explosive, representing sudden releases of withheld energies that have in other ways been forbidden, and so man’s mass psyche expresses itself sometimes like explosive fireworks, simply because the release of pressure is necessary.

Even your poor misguided moral/religious organization is saying in its fashion to the scientifically-oriented society: “How is faith not real, then?  We’ll change your laws with it.  We’ll turn it into power – political power.  What will you say then?  We have been laughed at for so long.  We will see who laughs now.”

Fanaticism abounds, of course, because the human tendencies and experiences that have been denied by the mainline society erupt with explosive force, where the tendencies themselves must be accepted as characteristics of human experience.  Iran is an example for the world, in explosive capsule form, complete with historical background and a modern political one.  Modern psychology does not have a concept of the self to begin to explain such realities.

Now, in the world you (Rob) early formed your own beliefs and strategies.  In midlife, you were presented with our sessions – or [the two of] you presented yourselves with them, if you prefer.  You recognized the overall vitality of our material – but again, you did not realize that it meant a complete reorientation of your attitudes.  You did not realize that you were being presented, not merely with an alternate view of reality, but with the closest approximation you could get of what reality was, and how it worked, and what it meant.

I have been very gentle in my treatment of your mores and institutions – for I do not want you to be against your world, but for a more fulfilling one.  Toward the end of our present book (Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment), we will be discussing how our ideas can be applied by the individual in terms of value fulfillment, so that individuals can begin to reclaim those dimensions of experience that are indeed your rightful heritage.

Now: For Ruburt, I want him to remember the idea of effortlessness, because with the best of intentions he has been trying too hard.  I want him to remember that relaxation is one of creativity’s greatest champions – not its enemy.  He is naturally gifted with the quickness of body and mind.  Remind him that it is safe to express his natural rhythms, to remember the natural person.  Your most vital inspirations are effortlessly yours.  I want you to see how many of your beliefs are the result of the old framework, for in that way you will find yourselves releasing yourselves more and more, so that your own strengths come to your support.

Magical Approach Session Thirteen

Session Thirteen: Rob Using the Magical Approach.  Precognition.

September 24, 1980

If you had first read the article of which you have been speaking, and then in semi-dozing state created your idea of a novel, replete with the characterization of the mother, then you would say that cause and effect were involved.

Science might admit that the novel idea itself was highly creative, an example of the mind at play as it used experience as a creative raw product – but of course you had your experience before you read the article.  And when that kind of thing happens science then proclaims that the two events are not connected to each other at all, but are instead the result of coincidental patterns.

In your terms, whether a minute or 10 minutes, or an hour or two hours were involved, you reacted ahead of time to a headline that you had not as yet physically encountered.  You reacted creatively, using the precognitive story as a basis for a fictional endeavor.  You turned it to art’s purposes.

As you lay there you were aware of the fact just beneath consciousness – usual consciousness – that you had not brought in the paper before your nap, as is your habit, and almost at a dream level you idly wondered what stories it might contain.  Your inclusion of the hospital mix-up in the tale was, as you suspected, connected with the medical ideas you have been dealing with of late (in extra notes for Mass Events, and the book by the physician) – and here was an excellent fictional idea, you see, that could, among other things, bring those ideas into prominence.

The idea, then, of the novel came from past and future events, though you were to catch up with those future events very quickly.  Your mind intuitively organized all of that material, and put it together in a completely new fashion.  Sometimes when such events occur, the precognitive trigger is not even recognized when it is encountered physically, because it happens too far ahead of time.  (To Rob): You organize mental and physical events in a creative manner.  In this case a novel was involved because the concept, while strongly involving images, carried a time span that would make narrative necessary.

You used the magical approach.  You caught yourself in the act of acting naturally, of demonstrating abilities that your society to a large degree does not admit.  That same kind of lightning-swift organization goes on within the body itself constantly, as it deals with probable scenarios to which you may or may not end up reacting to.

The events themselves discussed in the newspaper article point up the same kind of magical affiliations.  The cells of the young men in question were always in communication, and all of those elements needed to bring about such a reunion took place at the magical level of activity.  Consciously, intellectually, the boys had no idea they were triplets.  You live personally in a world of lush creative ideas.  Your intellect is aware of that.  It is used to working creatively.  The focused intellect can indeed activate the intuitive abilities – and the healing abilities.  You get what you concentrate upon.

The intellect is a vital organizer even if it is not aware of the magical levels of activity from which often its best ideas emerge.

This will be a very brief session.  When you look at world events, however, the present world situation for example (the war between Iraq and Iran, which began a few days ago,) try to enlarge the scope of your intellectual reach, so that you consider world events as living multidimensional “novels” being formed in the present in response to both future and past triggers.  The impact of the future on the past, in your terms – or rather, the implications of the future on the present – are highly important, and such precognitive reactions are as vital, numerous, and real as you ordinarily think that the reactions to past events are.

This puts present world events in an entirely different perspective.  Men act, then, in relationship to events that have, historically speaking, not yet occurred – but those events happening, say, in the future, in certain terms cast their shadows back into the present, or illuminate the past according to the event’s characteristics.  There is always more going on than ordinary sense data show.

In your comparatively simple experience, you can see, however, the implications of such activities.  Men may react to future events by unconsciously translating them into art, or motion pictures.  They may react by unconsciously taking certain steps of a political nature that seem at the time either unreasonable, or even incomprehensible – steps whose logic appears only in hindsight.

The same occurs, of course, in all areas of human behavior, as well as the behavior of animals and even of plants.  This future shadowing the present, or future illuminating the present, represents a vital element in the formation of events as they are perceived in time.  In a fashion the triplets were reacting in their past to a future event that has now caught up with them, so that each of their actions in any moment of that past happened as a result of a tension – a creative tension – between the event of their original separation and the event of their future reunion.

I do not mean that the reunion was inevitable or predestined, but the vigor of that probability, you might say, magnified the original tension.  I want Ruburt to apply all of this to his own situation, both in terms of creative endeavors and his physical situation, so that he begins to understand that he can start to react in the present to a future recovery.

He can see how important periods of letting go are.  Your experience happened when you were nearly asleep, but merely relaxed, not worrying, with your intellect in a kind of free flow.  You were not hampering it.  It was momentarily free of limiting beliefs, and it naturally used – and chose to use – the magical approach to answer what was a very simple, now-forgotten intellectual question: What might be in today’s newspaper?

The usual answer, or the usual method of obtaining an answer, was at the time inconvenient: You were not about to get up, go outside and get the paper, so on its own the intellect pressed the magical-approach button, you might say, getting the information the quickest and easiest way possible.

It did not give you the bare headline, however – even though that and the story were perceived far too quickly for you to follow.  What you were aware of were your own creative reveries in response to that information.

Now left alone, the intellect will often solve problems in just such a fashion, when it is allowed to, when you forget what is supposed to be possible and what is not, when you forget that your mind is supposed pedestrian and parochial.