Session 719

Unknown Reality, Session 719

I consider my own book, The Nature of Personal Reality, as a prerequisite for the exercises given here in this volume.

In that previous book I discussed the ways in which you form your private experience through your beliefs.  You have certain pet ideas, therefore, and you use them to structure your own world view of the reality you know.  It is important that you understand what your own beliefs are.  Many of them might work quite well “at home”, but when you begin to journey away from that home station you may find that those same ideas impede your progress.

Other concepts are really not basically workable even in your own physical reality.  A rigid, dogmatic concept of good and evil will force you to perceive physical existence as a battleground of opposing forces, with the poor unwary soul almost as a buffer.  Or you will think of the poor soul as a blackboard eraser, slapped between two hands – one good and one evil.

Upon the blackboard, in this homey analogy, would be written the soul’s earthly experiences.  With the eraser the “evil hand” would try to rub out all of the good, and at the same time the “good hand” would be trying to erase all of the evil.  In such a case all of your experience becomes suspect.  You will have a tendency to consider the body with its natural appetites wrong, and deny them, while at the same time the physical part of you will look upon your “good intents” as wrong, and infringements upon its own existence.

If you do not understand the natural grace of your being, then when you try some of the exercises given here you may automatically translate them into a quite limiting set of beliefs.

You are familiar with your own view of the world.  As you leave your usual orientation, however, altering the focus of your consciousness, you may very well structure your new experience just as you do your physical one.  At the same time, you are more free.  You have greater leeway.  You are used to projecting your beliefs into physical objects and events.  When you leave your home station, those objects and events no longer present themselves in the same fashion.

You often find yourself encountering your own structures, no longer hidden in the kind of experience with which you are familiar.  These may then appear in quite a different light.  You may be convinced that you are evil simply because you are physical.  You may believe that the soul “descends” into the body, and therefore that the body is lower, inferior, and a degraded version of “what you really are”.  At the same time your own physical being knows better, and basically cannot accept such a concept.  So in daily life you may project this idea of unworth outward onto another person, who seems then to be your enemy; or upon another nation.  In general, you might select animals to play the part of the enemy, or members of another religion, or political parties.

In any case, in your private life you may hardly ever encounter your belief in your own unworth, or evil.  You will not realize that you actually consider yourself the enemy.  You will be so convinced that your projection (onto others) is the enemy that there will be no slack to take up, for all of your feelings of self-hate or self-fear will be directed outward.

When you begin to leave your home station and alter your focus, however, you leave behind you the particular familiar receptors for your projections.  Using the Ouija board or automatic writing, you may find yourself immediately confronted with this material that you have suppressed in the past.  When it surfaces you may then project it outward from yourself again, but in a different fashion.  Instead of thinking you are in contact with a great philosopher or “ancient soul”, you may believe that you are instead visiting with a demon or devil, or that you are possessed of an evil spirit.

In such a case, you will have already been convinced of the power of evil.  Your natural feelings, denied, will also carry the great charge of repression.  You may be filled with the feeling that you are in the midst of a great cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil – and indeed, this often represents a valid picture of your own view of the world.

None of this is necessary.  There is no danger in the exercises I suggest.  You are in far greater danger the longer you inhibit your natural feelings, and alterations of consciousness often present you with the framework in which these come to light.  If they do not in one way or another come to your attention, then it is very possible that the denied energy behind them will erupt in ruptured relationships or illnesses.

“Psychic explorations” never cause such difficulties, nor do they ever compound original problems.  On the contrary, they are often highly therapeutic, and they present the personality with an alternative – an alternative to continued repression that would be literally unbearable.

If you are normally capable of dealing with physical reality, you will encounter no difficulties in alterations of consciousness, or leaving your home station.  Be reasonable, however: If you have difficulties in New York City, you are most apt to encounter them in a different form no matter where else you might travel.  A change of environment might help clear your head by altering your usual orientation, so that you can see yourself more clearly, and benefit.  The same applies when you leave your home station.  Here the possible benefits are far greater than in usual life and travel, but you are still yourself.  It is impossible not to structure reality in some fashion.  Reality implies a structuring.

If you take your own world view with you all of the time, however, as you travel, even in your own world, then you never see the “naked culture”.  You are always a tourist, taking your homey paraphernalia with you and afraid to give it up.  If you are American or English, or European, then when you visit other areas of the world you stay at cosmopolitan hotels.  You always see other cultures through your own eyes.

Now when you leave your home station and alter your consciousness, you are always a tourist if you take your own baggage of ideas along with you, and interpret your experiences through your own personal, cultural beliefs.  There is nothing unconventional about gods and demons, good spirits or bad spirits.  These are quite conventional interpretations of experience, with religious overtones.  Cults simply represent counter-conventions, and they are as dogmatic in their way as the systems they reject.

When you try these exercises, therefore, make an honest attempt to leave your conventional ideas behind you.  Step out of your own world view.  There is an exercise that will help you.

PRACTICE ELEMENT 13

Close your eyes.  Imagine a photograph of yourself.  In your mind’s eye see the photograph of yourself on a table or desk.  If you are working mentally with a particular snapshot, then note the other items in the picture.  If the photograph is strictly imaginary, then create an environment about the image of yourself.

Look at the image in your mind as it exists in the snapshot, and see it as being aware only of those other objects that surround it.  Its world is bounded by the four edges of the picture.  Try to put your consciousness into that image of yourself.  Your world view is limited to the photograph itself.  Now in your mind see that image walking out of the snapshot, onto the desk or table.  The environment of the physical room will seem gigantic to that small self.  The scale and proportion alone will be far different.  Imagine that miniature image navigating in the physical room, then going outside, and quite an expanded world view will result.

Many of you do not really want to step out of the photograph, or leave your world view, yet in the dream state you are far freer.  You can pretend that dreams are not “real”, however, so you can have your cake and eat it too, so to speak.

Different varieties of dreams often provide frameworks that allow you to leave your own world under “cushioned conditions”.  You step out of the normal picture that you have made of reality.

Your alterations of consciousness frequently occur in the dream state, therefore, where it seems to you at least that your experiences do not have any practical application.  You imagine that only hallucinations are involved.  Many of your best snapshots of other realities are taken in your dreams.  They may be over-or-underdeveloped, and the focus may be blurred, but your dreams present you with far more information about the unknown reality than you suppose.  In the most intimate terms your body is your home station, so when you leave it you often hide this fact from yourselves.

In your sleep, however, your consciousness slips out of your body and returns to it frequently.  You dream when you are out of your body, even as you dream inside it.  You may therefore form dream stories about your own out-of-body travel, while your physical image rests soundly in bed.  The unknown reality, you see, is not really that mysterious to you.  You only pretend that it is.  Sometimes you have quite clear perceptions of your journeys, but the actual native territories that you visit are so different from your own world that you try to interpret them as best you can in the light of usual conditions.  If you remember such an episode at all it may well seem very confusing, for you will have superimposed your own world view where it does not belong.

In dream travel it is quite possible to journey to other civilizations – those in your past or future, or even to worlds whose reality exists in other probable systems.  There is even a kind of “cross-breeding”, for you affect any system of reality with which you have experience.  There are no closed realities, only apparent boundaries that seem to separate them.  The more parochial your own world view, however, the less you will recall of your dreams or your activities, or the more distorted your “dream snapshots” will be.

Now here is another brief but potent exercise.

PRACTICE ELEMENT 14

Before you go to sleep, tell yourself that you will mentally take a dream snapshot of the most significant dream of the night.  Tell yourself that you will even be aware of doing this while asleep, and imagine that you have a camera with you.  You mentally take this into the dream state.  You will use the camera at the point of your clearest perceptions, snap your picture, and – mentally again – take it back with you so that it will be the first mental picture that you see when you awaken.

You will, of course, try to snap as good a picture as possible.  Varying results can be expected.  Some of you will awaken with a dream picture that presents itself immediately.  Others may find such a picture suddenly appearing later in the day, in the middle of ordinary activities.  If you perform this exercise often, however, many of you will find yourselves able to use the camera consciously even while sleeping, so that it becomes an element of your dream travels; you will be able to bring more and more pictures back with you.

These will be relatively meaningless, however, if you do not learn how to examine them.  They are not simply to be filed away and forgotten.  You should write down a description of each scene and what you remember of it, including your feelings both at the time of the dream, and later when you record it.  The very effort to take this camera with you makes you more of a conscious explorer, and automatically helps you to expand your own awareness while you are in the dream state.  Each picture will serve as just one small glimpse of a different kind of reality.  You cannot make any valid judgment on the basis of one or two pictures alone.

Now this is a mental camera we are using.  There is a knack about being a good dream photographer, and you must learn how to operate the camera.  In physical life, for example, a photographer knows that many conditions affect the picture he takes.  Exterior situations then are important: You might get a very poor picture on a dark day, for instance.  With our dream camera, however, the conditions themselves are mental.  If you are in a dark mood, for example, then your picture of inner reality might be dim, poorly outlined, or foreboding.  This would not necessarily mean that the dream itself had tragic overtones, simply that it was taken in the “poor light” of the psyche’s mood.

Inner weather changes constantly, even as the exterior weather does.  One dream picture with a dreary cast, therefore, is not much different from a physical photograph taken on a rainy afternoon.

Many people, however, remembering a dark dream, become frightened.  You even structure your dreams, of course.  For that matter, your dream world is as varied as the physical one.  Each physical photographer has an idea of what he wants to capture on film, and so to that extent he structures his picture and his view.  The same applies to the dream state.  You have all kinds of dreams.  You can take what you want, so to speak, from dream reality, as basically you take what you want from waking life.  For that reason, your dream snapshots will show you the kind of experience that you are choosing from inner reality.