Session 721

Unknown Reality, Session 721

When you look into a mirror you see your reflection, but it does not talk back to you.  In the dream state you are looking into the mirror of the psyche, so to speak, and seeing the reflections of your own thoughts, fears, and desires.

Here, however, the “reflections” do indeed speak, and take their own form.  In a certain sense they are freewheeling, in that they have their own kind of reality.  In the dream state your joys and fears talk back to you, perform, and act out the role in which you have cast them.

If, for example, you believe that you are possessed of great inner wealth, you may have a dream about a king in fine palace.  The king actually need not look like you at all, nor need you identify with him in the dream.  Symbolically, however, this would represent one way of expressing your feelings.  Inner wealth would be interpreted here in the same terms as worldly luxury.  The dream, once created, would go its own way.  If you have conflicts over the ideas connected with good and evil, or wealth and poverty, then the king might lose his lands or goods, or some catastrophe might befall him.

If you suspect that abundance is somehow spiritually dangerous, then the king might be captured and punished.  All kinds of other events might be involved: groups of people, for example, representing bands of “rampaging” desires.  The entire drama would involve the “evolution” of an emotion or belief.  In the dream state you set it free and see what will happen to it, how it will develop, where it will go.

The reflections of your ideas and intimate emotions are then projected outward in a rich drama.  You can observe the play, take a role in it, or move in and out of its acts as you prefer.  You will use your own private symbols.  These represent your psychic shorthand.  They are connected with your personal creativity, so dream books will not help you in deciphering those meanings if they attach a specific significance to any given symbol.  Symbols themselves change.  If you had before you your entire dream history and could read – as in a book – the story of all of your dreams from birth, you would discover that you changed the meaning of your symbols as you went along, or as it suited your purposes.  The content of a dream itself has much to do with the way you employ any given symbol.

The king, for example, may be at one time the symbol of great inner wealth.  He may be kingly but poor, signifying the idea that wealth does not necessarily involve physical goods.  He might at another time appear as a dictator, cruel and overbearing, where he would represent an entirely different framework of feeling and belief.  He might show himself as a young monarch, signaling a belief that “youth is king”.  At various times in history the same image has been used quite differently.  When people are fighting dictatorial monarchs then often the king appears in dreams as a despicable character, to be booted and routed out.

Whether or not you remember your dreams, you are educating yourself as they happen.  You may suddenly “awaken” while still within the dream state, however, and recognize the drama that you have yourself created.  At this point you will understand the fact that the play, while seeming quite real, is to a certain extent hallucinatory.  If you prefer, you can clear the stage at once by saying, “I do not like this play, and so I will create it no longer”.  You may then find yourself facing an empty stage, becoming momentarily disoriented at the sudden lack of activity, and promptly begin to form another dream play more to your liking.

If, however, you pause first and wait a moment, you can begin to glimpse the environment that serves as a stage: the natural landscape of the dream reality.  In waking life, if you want to disconnect yourself from an event or place, you try to move away from it in space.  In dream reality events occur in a different fashion, and places spring up about you.  If you meet with people or events not of your liking, then you must simply move your attention away from them, and they will disappear as far as your experience is concerned.  In physical reality you can move fairly freely through space, but you do not travel from one city to another, for example, unless you want to.  Intent is invoked.  This is so obvious that its significance escapes you: but it is intent that moves you through space, and that is behind all of your physical locomotion.  You utilize ships, automobiles, trains, airplanes, because you want to go to another place, and certain vehicles work best under certain conditions.

In the waking state you travel to places.  They do not come to you.  In dream reality, however, your intent causes places to spring up about you.  They come to you, instead of the other way around.  You form and attract “places”, or a kind of inner space in which you then have certain experiences.

This inner space does not “displace” normal space, or knock it aside.  Yet the creation of a definite inner environment or location is concerned.

Those of you who are curious, try this experiment.

PRACTICE ELEMENT 15

In a dream, attempt to expand whatever space you find yourself in.  If you are in a room, move from it into another one.  If you are on a street, follow it as far as you can, or turn a corner.  Unless you are working out ideas of limitations for your own reasons, you will find that you can indeed expand inner space.  There is no point where an end to it need appear.

The properties of inner space, therefore, are endless.  Most people are not this proficient in dream manipulation, but surely some of my readers will be able to remember what I am saying, while they are dreaming.  To those people I say: “Look around you in the dream state.  Try to expand any location in which you find yourself.  If you are in a house, remember to look out the window.  And once you walk to that window, a scene will appear.  You can walk out of that dream house into another environment; and theoretically at least you can explore that world, and the space within it will expand.  There will be no spot in the dream where the environment will cease.”

Now: What you think of as exterior expands in precisely the same manner.  In this respect, dream reality faithfully mirrors what you refer to as the nature of the exterior world.

Earth experience, even in your terms, is far more varied than you ever consciously imagine.  The intimate life of a person in one country, with its culture, is far different from that of an individual who comes from another kind of culture, with its own ideas of art, history, politics or religion or law.  Because you focus upon similarities of necessity, then the physical world possesses its coherence.

There are unknown gulfs that separate the private experience of a poor Indian, a rich Indian, a native in New Guinea, an American tailor, an African nationalist, a Chinese aristocrat, an Irish housewife.  These differences cannot be objectively stated.  They bring about qualitative differences, however, in the experience of space and time.

There are jet travelers and those who have never seen a train, so your own system of reality contains vast contrasts.  The dream state, however, involves you with a kind of communication that is not physically practical, for there no man or woman is caught without a given role; no individual’s ideas in the dream state are limited by his or her cultural background, or physical experience.

Even those who have never seen an airplane can travel from place to place in the twinkling of an eye, and the poor are fed, the ignorant are wise, the sick are well.  The creativity that may be physically hampered is expressed.  It is true that the hungry man, awakening, is still hungry.  The ill may awaken no healthier than they were before.  In deeper terms, however, in the dream state each person will be working out his or her own problems or challenges.  Dreaming, a person can cure himself or herself of a disease, working through the problems that caused it.  Dreaming, the hungry individual can discover ways to find food, or to procure the money to buy it.  Dreaming is a practical activity.  If it were understood as such, it would be even more practical in your terms.

Animals also dream, for example, and whole herds of starving animals will be led by their dreams to find better feeding grounds.  In the same way, the dreams of starving people point toward the solution of their problem.  Such data are largely ignored, however.  In the dream state any individual can find the solution to whatever challenge exists.

The great natural cooperation that exists between the waking and the dreaming self has been mostly set aside.  The conscious mind is quite equipped to interpret dream information.

You forget that dreaming is a part of life.  You have disconnected it in your thoughts, at least, from your daily experience, so that dreams seem to have no practical application.

You live in a waking and dreaming mental environment, however.  In both environments you are conscious.

Your dream experience represents a pivotal reality, like the center of a wheel.  Your physical world is one spoke.  You are united with all of your other simultaneous experiences through the nature of the dream state.  The unknown reality is there presented to your view, and there is no biological, mental, or psychic reason why you cannot learn to use and understand your own dreaming reality.

In your dreams, in your terms, you find your personal past appearing in the present, so in those terms the past of the species also occurs.  Future probabilities are worked out there also so that individually and en masse the species decides upon its probable future.  There is a feeling, held by many, that a study of dream reality will lead you further away from the world you know.  Instead, it would connect you with that world in most practical terms.

I said that inner space expands, but so does inner time.  Those of you who can remember, try the following experiment.

PRACTICE ELEMENT 16

When you find yourself within a dream, tell yourself you will know what happened before you entered it, and the past will grow outward from that moment.  Again, there will be no place where time will stop.  The time in a dream does not “displace” physical time.  It opens up from it.  Exterior time, again, operates in the same fashion, though you do not realize it.

Time expands in all directions, and away from any given point.  The past is never done and finished, and the future is never concretely formed.  You choose to experience certain versions of events.  You then organize these, nibbling at them, so to speak, a bit “at a time”.

The creativity of any given entity is endless, and yet all of the potentials for experience will be explored.  The poor man may dream he is a king.  A queen, weary of her role, may dream of being a peasant girl.  In the physical time that you recognize, the king is still a king, and the queen a queen.  Yet their dreams are not as uncharacteristic or apart from their experiences as it might appear.  In greater terms, the king has been a pauper and the queen a peasant.  You follow in terms of continuity one version of yourself at any given “time”.

Many people realize intuitively that the self is multitudinous and not singular.  The realization is usually put in reincarnational terms, so that the self is seen as traveling through the centuries, moving through doors of death and life into other times and places.

The fact is that the basic nature of reality shows itself in the nature of the dream state quite clearly, where in any given night you may find yourself undertaking many roles simultaneously.  You may change sex, social position, national or religious alliance, age, and yet know yourself as yourself.

Lately Joseph has found himself embarked upon a series of episodes that seem to involve reincarnational existences.  There was a catch, however.  He saw himself as a woman – black.  Last month he also saw himself as a Roman soldier aboard a slave ship.  He previously had experience that convinced him that he was a man called Nebene.  All of this could have been accepted quite easily in conventional terms of reincarnation, but Joseph felt that Nebene and the Roman soldier had existed during the same general time period, and he was not sure where to place the woman.

In all of these episodes, definite emotional experience was involved.  Also connected was an indefinable but unmistakable sense of familiarity.  Space and time continually expand, and all probabilities of any given action are actualized in one reality or another.  All of the potentials of the entity are also actualized.

Quite literally, you live more than one life at a time.  You do not experience your century simply from one separate vantage point, and the individuals alive in any given century have far deeper connections than you realize.  You do not experience your space-time world, then, from one but from many viewpoints.

If you are glutted – sated – with a steak dinner, for example, in America or Europe, then you are also famished in another portion of the world, experiencing life from an entirely different viewpoint.  You speak of races of men.  You do not understand how consciousness is distributed in that regard.  You have counterparts of yourself.

Generally speaking, the people living within any given century are related in terms of consciousness and identity.  This is true biologically and spiritually, through interrelationships you do not understand.

Joseph was “picking up” on lives that “he” lived in the same time scheme.  In this way and in your terms, he was beginning to recognize the familyship that exists between individuals who share your earth at any given time.

Each identity has free will, and chooses its environment as a physical stance in space and time.  Those involved in a given century are working on particular problems and challenges.  Various races do not simply “happen”, and diverse cultures do not just appear.  The greater self “divides” itself, materializing in flesh as several individuals, with entirely different backgrounds – yet with each embarked upon the same kind of creative challenge.

The black man is somewhere a white man or woman in your time.  The white man or woman is somewhere black.  The oppressor is somewhere the oppressed.  The conqueror is somewhere the conquered.  The primitive is somewhere sophisticated – and, in your terms, somewhere on the face of the same earth in your general time.  The murderer is somewhere the victim, and the other way around – and again, in your terms of space and time.

Each will choose his or her own framework, according to the intents of the consciousness of which each of you is an independent part.  In such a fashion are the challenges and opportunities inherent in a given “time” worked out.

You are counterparts of yourselves, but as Ruburt would say, living “eccentric” counterparts, each with your own abilities.  So Joseph “was” Nebene, a scholarly man, not adventurous, obsessed with copying ancient truths, and afraid that creativity was error; authoritative and demanding.  He feared sexual encounter, and he taught rich Roman children.

At the same time, in the same world and in the same century, Joseph was an aggressive, adventurous, relatively insensitive Roman officer, who would have little understanding of manuscripts or records – yet who also followed authority without question.

In your terms, Joseph is now a man who questions authority, stamps upon it and throws it aside, who rips apart the very idea structures to which he “once” gave such service.

In greater terms, these experiences all occur at once.  The black woman followed nothing but her own instincts.  I do not want to give too much background here, and hence rob our Joseph of discoveries that he will certainly make on his own – but the woman bowed only to the authority of her own emotions, and those emotions automatically put her in conflict with the [British colonial] politics of the times.

The Roman soldier dreams of the black woman, and of Joseph.  There is a reminiscence that appears even in the knowledge of the cells, and a certain correspondence.  There are connections then as far as cellular recollection is concerned, and dreams.  Now the Roman soldier and Nebene and the woman went their separate ways after death: They contributed to the world as it existed, in those terms, and then followed their own lines of development, elsewhere, in other realities.  So each of you exists in many times and places, and versions of yourselves exist in the world and time that you recognize.  As you are part of a physical species, so you are a part of a species of consciousness.  That species forms the races of mankind that you recognize.

In your terms only, [neither of you] … has a reincarnational future.  … You have accepted this as your breaking-off point.  In other terms there are three future lives, but your greater intents, as of now, break you off from this system of reality, and you have journeyed, both of you, into another; and from that other reality I speak.  In those terms I am a part of both of your realities.  Think of this in terms of other information given this evening, and you may see what I mean.