Session 938 Nature Spirits

Dreams, Evolution, Fulfillment: Session 938

The entire picture of physical life as you understand it must be of course experienced from your own viewpoint, but its complexity, its order and magnificence of structure and design should be understood as composing but one example of the infinite number of realities, each constructed by the propensities and characteristics of its own nature and the nature of its own consciousness.

The word “unconscious” is in a fashion meaningless.  There are endless versions [of consciousness], of course, with their own worlds, forming organizations of meaning and purpose.  Some of these mingle with your own and vice versa.  The “inner structure” is one of consciousness, and the deeper questions can eventually only be approached by granting the existence of inner references.

The nature of time, questions concerning the beginning or ending of the universe – these cannot be approached with any certainty by studying life’s exterior conditions, for the physical references themselves are merely the manifestations of inner psychological activity.  You are aware of the universe only insofar as it impinges upon your perception.  What lies outside of that perception remains unknown to you.  It seems to you, then, that the world began – or must have begun – at some point in the past, but that is like supposing that one piece of a cake is the whole cake, which was baked in one oven and consumed perhaps in an afternoon.

The inner references of reality involve a different kind of experience entirely, with organizational patterns that mix and merge at every conceivable point.  You tune your consciousness while you sleep as one might tune a piano, so that in waking reality, it clearly perceives the proper notes and values that build up into physical experience.  Those inner fields of reference in which you have your existence are completely changing themselves as your experience is added to them, and your own identity was couched in those references before birth as you understand it.

You are one conscious version of yourself, creating along with all of your contemporaries the realities of the times.  When I use the term “contemporaries”, I refer to all of the species.  You read your consciousness in certain fashions, but it is quite possible to read the consciousness of the world in other ways also.

If you read it sideways, so to speak, you would still end up with an orderly universe, but one in which the nature of identity would be read completely differently, stressing adjacent subjective communications of a conscious kind that form other kinds of patterns of subjectivity and psychological continuity.  These result in the formation of “personalities” or entities who are aware of their own identities by following different pathways than your own, while also in their way contributing to the formation of your universe even as you do.

Your numbering of the species is highly capricious.  Again, you recognize as alive only those varieties of life that fall within certain ranges of attention.  You objectify and diversify.  The lines drawn between the self and what is nonself, between an organism and its environment, are highly arbitrary on your part.  There are psychological patterns, therefore, that completely escape your notice because they do not follow the conventions that you have established.  These combine what you diversify, so that you have hidden psychological values or psychological beings that combine the properties of the environment and the properties of selfhood in other combinations than those you know.

They would seem to be the spirits of nature, as you would be more or less bound to interpret them from your viewpoint.  They would certainly be psychological relatives, but with their own time schemes, languages, and psychological affiliations.  These do exist along with the kinds of consciousness that you recognize within the structure of physical life.  When you dream, however, you often come in contact with these cousins of consciousness.  It is not simply that they communicate with you, or you with them, so much as it is that in sleep the conventional properties that you have learned are somewhat loosened and abandoned.  You see “the lights around the corner”, so to speak.  You see a species of consciousness, a species that must remain unexplained in any normal explanations of evolution, and these hint at the communications that exist at all levels, protecting not only the genetic references necessary to your own kind, but the combinations of other forms of organization that exist adjacent to your own, yet connected to them.  You have often misread such references, and many of your legends of good and evil spirits, monsters and strange varieties of artificial creatures, appear in folklore.

At one time, however, you encountered such formations in a different light, of course, seeing many similarities between their behavior and yours – certain characteristic ways of perceiving at least some experience that elicited your response and recognition.

At one time, then, you were more open in a fashion to the kinds of consciousness that you admitted into your circle of reality.  At one time, in those terms, you did not draw the lines as finely as you do now.  Instead you included such cousins of consciousness into your midst, accepting a kind of comradeship – for to some extent at least you could see the different versions of humanity that resulted from a change of focus, an adjacent affiliation of humanized energy with the environment.  Quite simply, you felt that in certain terms you had other brothers and sisters in the world that were like you but unlike you, that put together the contents of the universe in their own fashions.  Such species, of course, can nowhere appear within the dictates of evolution or be perceived as realities except under those conditions when you relax your usual conventions of perception and behavior.

Nevertheless, encounters between you occur frequently – in the dream state as stated, in alterations of your usual focus, and in your arts, where you are less arbitrary in your definitions.  As you began to bring your own physical reality into harder, clearer focus, you stopped with your own view of human consciousness, shutting off completely and rather arbitrarily those other elements in order to more clearly frame and define the boundaries of physical order.  It seems to you now that such personalities are not physically perceivable, but at one time you could bring them into the range of your perception.

You ended your classifications where you did, however, preferring to see man as the king of intelligence.  This meant that you abruptly drew the line where it now seems it must have been drawn.  You continued that companionship, however, at other levels of activity, levels that are still open and that must be taken into consideration whenever we approach any discussion of dreaming and the dreaming world.