Session 695

Unknown Reality, Session 695

Practice Element 2

I would like each reader to try two exercises.  First of all, take any incident that happens to you the day you read this page.  See the particular chosen event as one that came into your experience from the vast bank of other probable events that could have occurred.

Examine the event as you know it.  Then try to trace its emergence from the thread of your own past life as you understand it, and project outward in your mind what other events might emerge from that one to become action in your probable future.  This exercise has another part: When you have finished the procedure just given, then change your viewpoint; see the event from the standpoint of someone else who is also involved.  No matter how private the experience seems, someone else will have a connection with it.  See the episode through his or her eyes, then continue with the procedure just given, only using this altered viewpoint.

No one can do this exercise for you, but the subjective results can be most astonishing.  Aspects of the event that did not appear before may be suddenly apparent.  The dimensions of the event will be experienced more fully.

Practice Element 3

For the second exercise, take a photograph of yourself and place it before you.  The picture can be from the past or the present, but try to see it as a snapshot of a self poised in perfect focus, emerging from an underneath dimension in which other probable pictures could have been taken.  That self, you see, emerges triumphantly, unique and unassailable in its own experience; yet in the features you see before you – in this stance, posture, expressions – there are also glimmerings, tintings or shadings, that are the echoes belonging to other probabilities.  Try to sense those.

Practice Element 4

Take another photograph of yourself at a different age than the first one you chose.  Ask yourself simply: “Am I looking at the same person?”  How familiar or how strange is this second photograph?  How does it differ from the first one you picked this evening?  What similarities are there that unite both photographs in your mind?  What experiences did you have when each photograph was taken?  What ways did you think of following in one picture that were not followed in the other one?  Those directions were pursued.  If they were not pursued by the self you recognize, then they were by a self that is probable in your terms.  In your mind follow what directions that self would have taken, as you think of such events.  If you find a line of development that you now wish you had pursued, but had not, then think deeply about the ways in which those activities could now fit into the framework of your officially accepted life.  Such musing, with desire – backed up by common sense – can bring about intersection points in probabilities that cause a fresh realignment of the deep elements of the psyche.  In such ways probable events can be attracted to your current living structure.

We have been speaking about probable men, and do intend to deal more deeply with probable man [or woman], as that is applied to your species.  The events of the species begin with the individual however.  All of the powers, abilities, and characteristics inherent in the species are inherent in any individual member of it.  Through understanding your own unknown reality, therefore, you can learn much about the unknown reality of the species.

Practice Element 5

Choose another photograph.  I want you to look at this one somewhat differently.  This should also be a photograph of yourself.  See this as one picture of yourself as a representative of your species in a particular space and time.  Look at it as you might look at a photograph of an animal in its environment.  If the photograph shows you in a room, for example, then think of the room as a peculiar kind of environment, as natural as the woods.  See your person’s picture in this way: How does it merge or stand apart from the other elements in the photograph?  See those other elements as characteristics of the image, view them as extended features that belong to you.  If the photograph is dark, for example, and shows shadows, then in this exercise see those as belonging to the self in the picture.

Imaginatively, examine your image from the viewpoint of another place in the photograph.  See how the image can be seen as a part of the overall pattern of the environment – the room, or furniture, or yard or whatever.

When you see a picture of an animal in its environment, you often make connects that you do not make when you see a picture of a human being in his or her environment.  Yet each location is as unique as the habitat of any animal – as private, as shared, as significant in terms of the individual and the species of which the individual is a part.  Simply to stretch your imagination: When you look at your photograph, imagine that you are a representative of a species, caught there in just that particular pose, and that the frame of the photograph represents, now, “a cage of time”.  You, from the outside looking down at the photograph, are now outside of that cage of time in which your specimen was placed.  The specimen, that individual, that you, represents not only yourself but one aspect of your species.  If you hold that feeling, then the element of time becomes as real as any of the other objects within the photograph.  Though unseen, time is the frame.

Now, look up.  The picture, the photograph, is but one small object in the entire range of your vision.  You are not only outside yourself in the photograph, but now it represents only a small portion of your reality.  Yet the photograph remains inviolate within its own framework; you cannot alter the position of one object within it.  If you destroy the photograph itself, you can in no way destroy the reality that was behind it.  You cannot, for instance, kill the tree that may be depicted in the picture.

The person within the photograph is beyond your reach.  The you that you are can make any changes you want to in your experience: You can change probabilities for your own purposes, but you cannot change the courses of other probable selves that have gone their own ways.  All probable selves are connected.  They influence one another.  There is a natural interaction, but no coercion.  Each probable self has its own free will and uniqueness.  You can change your own experience in the probability you know – which itself rides upon infinite other probabilities.  You can bring into your own experience any number of probable events, but you cannot deny the probable experience of another portion of your reality.  That is, you cannot annihilate it.

As you are looking at one photograph in your personal history, that represents your emergence in this particular reality – or the reality that was accepted as official at the time it was taken – so you are looking at a picture of a representative of your species, caught in a particular moment of probability.  That species has as many offshoots and developments as you have privately.  As there are probable selves in private terms, there are probable selves in terms of the species.  As you have your recognized, official personal past, so in your system of actuality you have more or less accepted an official mass history.  Under examination, however, that history of the species shows many gaps and discrepancies, and it leaves many questions to be answered.

Section 3: THE PRIVATE PROBABLE MAN, THE PRIVATE PROBABLE WOMAN, THE SPECIES IN PROBABILITIES, AND BLUEPRINTS FOR REALITIES

We have been using Ruburt and Joseph’s private experience here.  For now, however, I would like each reader to consider the members of his or her family, so that in a more direct fashion the reader can find in private experience a realization of some ideas I want to present.

Practice Element 6

In your terms, think of those ancestors in your family history.  Now think of yourself and your contemporary family.  For this, try to imagine time as being something like space.  If your ancestors lived in the 19^th century, then think of that century as a place that exists as surely as any portion of the earth that you know.  See your own century as another place.  If you have children, imagine their experience 50 years hence as still another place.

Now: Think of your ancestors, yourself, and your children as members of one tribe, each journeying into different countries instead of times.  Culture is as real and natural as trees and rocks, so see the various cultures of these three groups as natural environments of the different places or countries; and imagine, then, each group exploring the unique environment of the land into which they have journeyed.  Imagine further of course that these explorations occur at once, even though communication may be faulty, so that each group has difficulty communicating with the others.  Imagine, however, that there is a homeland from which our groups originally came.  Each expedition sends “letters” back home, commenting upon the behavior, customs, environment, and history of the land it which it finds itself.

These letters are written in an original native language that has little to do with the acquired language that has been picked up in any given country.  Mama and Papa, back at the homestead, know where their children have gone, in other words; they read with amusement, amazement, and wonder the communications from their offspring.  In this homespun analogy, Mama and Papa send letters back – also in the native language – to their children.  As time goes by, however, the children lose their memories of their home tongue.  Mama and Papa know that times are like places or countries, but their children begin to forget this, too, and so they grow to believe that they are far more separate from each other than they actually are.  They have “gone native” in a different way.  Mama and Papa understand.  The children forgot that they can move through time as easily as through space.

Remember, in this analogy the various children represent your ancestors, yourself, and your own children.  They are exploring the land of time.  Now in your physical world it is obvious that nature grows more of itself.  In the land of time, time also grows more of itself.  As you can climb trees, both up and down the branches, so you can climb times in the same way.  Back home, Mama and Papa know this.  The family tree exists at once – but that tree is only one tree that appears in the land of time.  It has branches that you do not climb and do not recognize, and so they are not real to you.  There are probable family trees, then.  The same applies to the species.

There are alternate realities, and these exist only because of the nature of probabilities.

The potentials of the true self are so multidimensional that they cannot be expressed in one space or time.  Any person who loves another recognizes the infinite potential within that other person.  That potential needs infinite opportunity; the true self’s reality needs an ever-new, changing situation, for each experience enriches it and, therefore, enhances its own possibilities.  En masse, in your terms, the same is true of the race of man.  Mama and Papa, in our analogy, represent the infinite potential within one basic unit (CU) of consciousness.

Then think of your ancestors, your immediate family, and your children, and sense in them the vast potential that is there.  Now: Imagine your species as you think of it, and the literally endless capacities for expression and creation simply in the areas of which you are aware.  No single time or space dimension could contain that creativity.  No single historic past could explain what you are now as an individual or as a member of a species.

Note 2: Officially Accepted Life

The “officially accepted life” mentioned here reminded me that in the last (694^th) session Seth used the phrase “your officially recognized idea of physical reality” in discussing the role probable events played in our world history.  In the 686^th session he referred to “official data” when he considered ancient man’s selection of certain mental and biological pulses as physical reality; later in the same session, he used the self-explanatory “official history”.  In the 684^th session he discussed “official activity” when he compared our reaction to hunches and premonitions with our acceptance of normal psychological reality.  Then, in the 681^st session, see what Seth has to say about individual biological history and the basic unpredictability of consciousness.