Session 639

Personal Reality, Session 639

Your body is you in flesh.  As I have mentioned in other books, the soul cannot affirm itself fully through bodily experience at any given “time”, so in those terms there are always portions of you that are unexpressed.

All of your physical experience must, of course, be pivoted in the corporeal reality of the body.  The energy that moves your image comes from the soul.  Through your own thoughts you direct the body’s expression, and it can be of health or illness.  Out of a knowledge of the contents of your own conscious mind you can definitely heal most maladies of the body, within conditions to be given later.

Your ideas themselves follow certain laws of creativity.  They have their own rhythms.  The associative processes of your mind, working through the brain, have great connection with the minute behavior of your cells.  As you learn to use your thoughts, or even as they naturally change, resulting alterations take place within the cells.  There is an orderly progression, an intimate relationship.

When massive doses of LSD are used, you are artificially creating a disaster area from which you hope to salvage an efficient working self.  It is true that the old interactions between an associative pattern of thought and its habitual action may be broken down, but it is also true that the inner-ordered structure has been shocked psychically and biologically.

In normal daily life, considerable natural therapy often takes place in the dream state, even when nightmares of such frightening degree arise that the sleeper is shocked into awakening.  The individual’s conscious mind is then forced to face the charged situation – but after the event, in retrospect.  The nightmare itself can be like a shock treatment given by one portion of the self to another, in which cellular memory is touched off much as it might be in such an LSD session.

But the self is its own best therapist.  It knows precisely how many such “shocks” the psyche can take to advantage, which associations to animate through such intense experience and imagery, and which ones to leave alone.

Nightmares in series are often inner-regulated shock therapy.  They may frighten the conscious self considerably, but after all it comes awake in its normal world, shaken perhaps but secure in the framework of the day.

Other dream events, though forgotten, may also cushion the individual to withstand the effects of such “nightmare therapy”.  In the same way that some LSD treatment finally results in a feeling of rebirth (that is often only temporary, however), so a period of such nightmares often leads quite naturally to dreams in which the self finally makes new and greater connections with the source of its own being.

If scientists studied the body and the mind in terms of natural healing abilities, they could learn how to encourage these, for such processes – and I have mentioned only one of them – are continuous through your lifetime.

When large doses of chemicals are used, the conscious mind is confronted full blast with very potent experiences that it was not meant to handle, and by which it is purposely made to feel powerless.  Faced with the exterior nightmares of wars and natural disasters, the conscious mind is still directed outward into that world with which it knows it was formed to cope.  In periods of great physical stress it draws upon the powers of the body and inner self to perform remarkable feats of heroism – that leave it wondering afterward at the power and energy of the self in crisis.

Its own stability and awareness can be vastly deepened and strengthened.  In times of seemingly calamitous encounters with nature, individuals may find themselves amazed at their capacity to relate with other people, but in the artificially induced psychic disaster area of massive LSD therapy, the situation is reversed.  Consciousness finds itself in a crisis situation; not [because of one coming] from the exterior world, but because it is forced to fight on a battleground for which it was never designed and cannot understand, where basically counted-upon allies of association, memory and organization, and all the powers of the inner self, are suddenly turned into enemies.

It is made vulnerable to all those forces it was meant to lead, while being stripped of its natural logical abilities – indeed, of its very sense of identity.  There is nothing exterior against which it can work, and no framework in which it can get balance.

Ruburt has been working on a book of poems called The Dialogues, and in it recently he wrote of the double worlds.  One night he stood at the kitchen window, and quite without drugs saw a rainy puddle below suddenly turn into an alive, beautifully fluid creature who stood up and walked while the rain slid off its liquid sides.

He was filled with joy as he observed this reality.  He knew that in the physical world the puddle was flat, but that he was perceiving another just-as-solid reality; a larger one, in fact, in which that rain creature had its being.

For a moment he saw double worlds with his physical vision.  While the experience was exhilarating, it could have turned into a “nightmare” had his conscious mind not clearly understood; had he walked outside, for example, and found himself encountering living creatures rising out of each rainy puddle; and if for the life of him he could not have turned the creatures back.  As it was, it was a beneficial experience.

But when the conscious mind is forced to face far less pleasant encounters, and is robbed of its power to reason at the same time, then you indeed insult the basis of its being.

A few moments following Ruburt’s experience with the rain creature, he had another.  His eyes were wide open and he stood in the exceedingly small kitchen – when suddenly there appeared before him a round soft yellow light.

He saw it physically, yet could find no physical cause for it.  It lasted several seconds and disappeared.  As soon as Ruburt saw it he leaped back.  The last line in the poem he had completed just before dinner spoke of a light that would illuminate both worlds, one of the soul and one of the flesh.  Consciously he thought the light must have been caused by lightning, even while he knew with another portion of himself that that was not the case.

A moment later the line from his poem came to him, and he made the proper connection.  The conscious mind was disturbed for a moment but it assimilated the data.  The meaning of the light will become even clearer through Ruburt’s dreams – the intuitive connection of the poem, and physical example.

The meaning of the light will normally become unfolded as he is ready to fully perceive it.  While the event has happened, therefore, like any event it is not completed.  In the drug experience mentioned before (in the last session), startling enforced symbols and occurrences are suddenly thrust upon the conscious mind; and more, within a context in which time as it knows it has little meaning.  It [the conscious mind] cannot reflect upon phenomena subjectively.  They happen too quickly.

Within their happening there may be a distorted -to it – grotesque duration in which action may be seemingly impossible.  No separation between self and experience may be allowed.  Even an exalted experience can be an assault upon consciousness if it is forced.  The price paid is much too high as far as the entire personality is concerned.

The feelings that are often realized in later sessions, say of rebirth, are indeed that.  The old organizations of the self have fallen, and the new structures do indeed rejoice in their oneness and vitality.

A strong suicidal base frequently exists here.  The knowledge is present that the “old self” did not make it – so what assurance does the so-called new self have?  Again, the body is a living sculpture.  You are in it and you form it, and it is to all intents and purposes you while you are physical.  You must identify your material being with it.  Otherwise you will feel alienated from your biological identity.

This identity is your physical self through which now, in your terms, all expression must come.  You are more than your temporal being alone.  Your life as a creature is dependent upon your alliance with flesh.  You will exist when your body is dead, but practically speaking, you will always be working through an image of yourself.

If you identify with your body alone, then you may feel that life after death is impossible.  If you consider yourself a mental being only, however, you will not feel alive in the flesh, but separated from it.  Think of yourself as a physical creature now.  Know that later you will still operate through another form, but that the body and the material world are your present modes of expression.

These attitudes are highly important.  In a strong drug experience you take physical demonstration out of its natural framework, presenting it in such a way that its usual reactions make no sense.  A world may be tumbling down upon you, for example, yet there is no adequate physical defense or retaliation possible.

The psychiatrist may say, “Go along entirely with the experience.  If necessary become annihilated.”  This flies directly in the face of your biological heritage, and the common sense of the conscious mind.

I am quite aware of the distorted religious connections made here: Die to yourself and you will be reborn; you will not kill yourself.  What you think of as the self dies and is reborn constantly, as the cells of your body do.  Biologically and spiritually, new life relies upon these innumerable changes and transformations, deaths and births that occur naturally both in the seasons of the earth and those of the psyche.

Change flexibly with the gracious dance of all being that is reflected in the universe of the body and mind.  This does not include the crucifixion of the ego.

It is always because you do not trust the natural self that you resort to such drug therapy.  The individuals who seek out treatment fear the nature of their own identity more than anything else.  They are then only too willing to sacrifice it.  Your thoughts and beliefs form your reality.  There is no magic therapy – only an understanding of your own great creativity, and the knowledge that you yourself make your world.

In physical life the soul is clothed in chemicals, and you will use the ingredients you take into your body to form an image that is in line with your beliefs.  Some of these ideas will undoubtedly be accepted by you from your culture.  Others will be your own private interpretation of yourself in flesh.  Your beliefs about any chemical will affect what it does.  Under LSD therapy you expect a drastic reaction and are told to prepare yourself.  Your experience will follow your beliefs and your therapist’s communicated verbally and telepathically.

If you believe, however, that the chemicals in certain foods will harm you drastically and bring about disastrous consequences, then even small doses of these can do you harm.

In the normal cycle of the death and rebirth of cells, and the usual pattern in which the ego constantly changes, there is a smooth flow and no loss of orientation.  Previous cellular memory is carried along easily from one cell generation to another.

As mentioned earlier (in the 610^th session in Chapter One), what you call the ego is a portion of the inner identity that rises to face the world of physical existence.  In the regular course of events it will change into another ego, but while losing its “dominant” status it will not die to itself.  It will alter its organization as a part of the living psyche.

Under enforced annihilation, there is a frantic attempt at reorganization as the inner self tries to “send up” alternate egos to handle the situation – and in those terms, the more egos you kill the more will emerge.

In all of this the body’s situation is highly agitated, and the physical organism is forced to respond as best it can to a series of disastrous events – which, however, it realizes it cannot be experiencing physically.  It knows a “mock” battle is going on, but cannot stop itself from sending forth those chemicals and hormones necessary to a physical situation of like degree.  There is a great wear and tear on the body, and an inexcusable exhaustion of its native energies.

Ideas form reality, so the body is used to reacting to some “imaginary” situations in which, for example, the mind conjures up dire circumstances which do not physically exist; but these still force the organism into an over-activation, setting up a state of stress.  In massive drug therapy the body feels in greatest threat, for it is forced to use all of its resources while its own signals tell it that the messages it is getting do not have a correlation – and yet they are of the most urgent nature.

To some extent there is also an assault upon simple creaturehood.  Its images and experience, furthermore, are seldom forgotten, and the so-called new ego is born with the memory of their imprint.  Some psychologists like to say that you cry out unconsciously against the natural method of your birth.  But here you have the situation where a self is faced with its own annihilation, while another “self” arises after conscious participation with its death.

I am aware that many psychologists and psychiatrists feel that they are charting the course of the psyche with these methods.  It is one thing, and unfortunate enough, to dissect a frog to see what did make it live.  It is triply dangerous to dissect a psyche, hoping to put it back together again.