Chapter 11: The Magical Approach, and the Relationships Between “Conservation” and Spontaneous Developments.
Session 936
In a fashion
dreams allow for a curious mixture of learning processes, while at the same
time serving to introduce surprising developments. That is, dreams promote the conservation of
knowledge. They are an aid in the
development of skills. They conserve
available information by weaving it through the other structures of your
experience.
At the same time,
dreams have their startling qualities, promoting the insertion of unexpected
developments, in which case they appear to deal with the breaking down
of conserving principles. In this
fashion, they also mirror your more exterior behavior, conserving what you know
already, and yet introducing new patterns, new spontaneous orders that would
sometimes seem to run against conservative issues. They reinforce the past, for example, when
you dream of past situations. They also
seem to undermine the integrity of the past by showing it to you in an
unfamiliar light, mixing it with present and future tints.
Many people might
wish that I would add many more methods to help you study dreams and their
nature. In such a manner also dreams
suggest nature’s spontaneous order throughout the centuries, and allow you to
look at the species in a truer light.
Your lives, for that matter, are dependent upon the curious
relationships that are involved: You would not get by for one day if the
conserving principles and the unexpected did not exist exactly as they do. There is so much you must learn and remember
in life, and so much you must spontaneously forget – otherwise, action itself
would be relatively meaningless.
You perform far
more actions in a day than you recall.
You do not know how many times you lift your arms, speak a sentence,
think a thought. With the kind of
consciousness you possess, an overreliance upon conserving principles could
then end up in a reduction of life’s processes.
In private living
and in so-called evolutionary terms, however, life necessitates the intrusion
of surprising events, unforeseen actions, leaps of insight or behavior that
could not come alone from any accumulation of knowledge or simple conservation
of energy, but seem to suggest entirely different new developments.
Dreams often
serve as the frameworks in which sudden remarkable insights appear that later
enable a man or a woman to envision the world in a way that was not earlier
predictable. The world’s activities
always include the insertion of surprising events. This is true at all levels of nature, from
microscopic to macroscopic. As I have
said before, all systems are open. The
theories of both evolutionists and creationists strongly suggest and reinforce
beliefs in the consecutive nature of time, and in a universe that begins in
such-and-such a fashion, continuing on to such-and-such an end – but there are horizontal
events that appear in the true activity of nature, and there are horizontal
entry points and exit points in all experience.
These allow for the insertion of unofficial new energy, the introduction
of surprising events.
Again, it is very
difficult to explain such activities.
They can affect – and do affect – the rise and fall of
civilizations. You are used to reading
nature in a particular manner, however, and to experiencing events at surface
levels. You are naturally equipped to
appreciate a far richer blend, and as I have often said, you are yourselves
possessed of a need to explore the subjective ramifications of your existence.
As “the times
change” you tire of the old ways. Even
your dreams begin to reach out into new avenues. The relationships between nature’s natural
conservative behavior and nature’s need for innovation are stretched. More and more remarkable events begin to
occur, both in private and mass experience, in physical and mental behavior, in
the events, say, of both stars and man.
People want,
then, to throw aside old structures of belief.
They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge
of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension
of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical
events” occurred quite naturally. They
begin to look at the structure of their lives in a different fashion that
attempts to evoke from nature, and from their own natures, some graceful
effortlessness, some freedom nearly forgotten.
They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to
their own lives. At such times the
conserving elements in nature and in society itself do not seem as strong as
they did before. Surprising events that
were earlier covered up or ignored seem to appear with greater frequency, and
everywhere a new sense of quickness and acceleration gradually alters the
expectations of people in regard to the events of their own lives, and to the
behavior they expect from others. You
are in such times now.
Old honored
explanations suddenly appear withered.
Unpredictable remarkable events seem more possible. The kind of work done in dreams to some
extent is changed. They become more
active, more intrusive. Predictable behavior,
even of the natural elements, is harder to take for granted. Man begins to sense more and more at such
times the vaster dimensions of behavior upon which that appearance of
conservation resides.
There are
considerable changes that occur under such conditions in man’s subjective
experience. Man’s feelings about himself
change too, but little by little his trust in unpredictability
grows. He is more willing to assign
himself to it. The species begins its
own kind of psychic migration. It begins
to sense within itself further frontiers and the possibilities for action. It begins to yearn for the exploration of
mental lands, and it sends portions of itself out as couriers.
Ruburt is that
kind of courier. There are many in all
areas of life, and this involves not only an excitement on the part of your own
species, but the same kind of curiosity and excitement on the part of other
species as well. Again, most difficult
to explain – but those connections that exist between all species and the environment
are themselves affected. The horizontal
communications stretch and expand to allow for later developments in terms of probabilities,
for consciousness always knows itself in more than one context, and it is possible
for nature to experience itself in ways that would seem to be most improbable when
the properties of conservation and learning are at their strongest spring.
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