“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.”
(Dreams, “Evolution” and Value Fulfillment Vol 2, Session 938)
No comments:
Post a Comment