Session 762

Nature of the Psyche, Session 762

When you are in touch with your psyche, you experience direct knowledge.  Direct knowledge is comprehension.  When you are dreaming, you are experiencing direct knowledge about yourself or about the world.  When you are reading a book, you are experiencing direct knowledge that may or may not lead to comprehension.  Comprehension itself exists whether or not you have words – or even the thoughts – to express it.  You may comprehend the meaning of a dream without understanding it at all in verbal terms.  Your ordinary thoughts may falter, or slip and slide around your inner comprehension without ever really coming close to expressing it.

Dreams deal with associations and with emotional validities that often do not seem to make sense in the usual world.  I said before that no one can really give you a definition of the psyche.  It must be experienced.  Since its activities, wisdom and perception rise largely from another kind of reference, then you must often learn to interpret your encounter with the psyche to your usual self.  One of the largest difficulties here is the issue of organization.  In regular life, you organize your experience very neatly and push it into accepted patterns or channels, into preconceived ideas and beliefs.  You tailor it to fit time sequences.  Again: The psyche’s organization follows no such learned predisposition.  Its products can often appear chaotic simply because they splash over your accepted ideas about what experience is.

In Seth Speaks I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality in terms that my readers could understand.  In The Nature of Personal Reality I tried to extend the practical boundaries of individual existence as it is usually experienced.  I tried to give the readers hints that would increase practical, spiritual, and physical enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life.  Those books were dictated by me in a more or less straight narrative style.  In “Unknown” Reality I went further, showing how the experiences of the psyche splash outward into the daylight, so to speak.  Hopefully in that book, through my dictation and through Ruburt’s and Joseph’s experiences, the reader could see the greater dimensions that touch ordinary living, and sense the psyche’s magic.  That book required much more work on Joseph’s part, and that additional effort itself was a demonstration that the psyche’s events are very difficult to pin down in time.

Seemingly its action goes out in all directions.  It may be easier to say, for example: “This or that event began at such a time, and ended later at such-and-such a time”.  As Joseph did his notes, however, it became apparent that some events could hardly be so pinpointed, and indeed seemed to have no beginning or end.

Because you tie your experience so directly to time, you rarely allow yourselves any experiences, except in dreams, that seem to defy it.  Your ideas about the psyche therefore limit your experience of it.  Ruburt is far more lenient than most of my readers in that regard.  Still, he often expects his own rather unorthodox experiences to appear in the kind of orderly garb with which you are all familiar.

In our last book session, I gave the title for this chapter, mentioning the emotions and association; and the fact that the psyche must be directly experienced.  I have not dictated a book session per se again until this evening.  In the meantime, Ruburt has been experiencing dimensions of the psyche new to him.

It did not occur to him that those experiences had anything to do with this book, or that in acting so spontaneously he was following any kind of inner order.  He wanted these pages to follow neatly one by one.  Each of his experiences, however, demonstrates the ways in which the psyche’s direct experiences defy your prosaic concepts of time, reality, and the orderly sequence of events.  They also served to point up the differences between knowledge and comprehension, and emphasize the importance of desire and of the emotions.

In a way, of course, my own experience is divorced from that of my readers.  As this information – the Seth material – is sifted through Ruburt’s experience, you are able to see how it applies to the existence that is “presently” yours.

Ruburt’s experiences of late are particularly important, in that by implication they run counter to many accepted core beliefs that are generally held.  We will use these latest episodes as an opportunity to discuss the presence of knowledge that appears to be “supernormal” – available, but usually untouched.  We will further describe the triggers that can make such information practical, or bring it into practical range.

First of all, there are several points I want to make.

You are born with the inclination toward language.  Language is implied in your physical structure.  You are born with the inclination to learn and to explore.  When you are conceived, there is already a complete pattern for your grown physical body – a pattern that is definite enough to give you the recognizable kind of adult form, while variable enough to allow for literally infinite variations.

It would be idiotic of you to say that you were forced to become an adult, however.  For one thing, at any given time you could end the process – and many do.  In other words, because the pattern for development exists in your terms, this does not mean that each such development is not unique.

In your terms again, then, at any one earth time many such patterns exist.  In greater respects however, all time is simultaneous, and so all such physical patterns exist at once.

In the psychic areas, all patterns for knowledge, cultures, civilizations, personal and mass accomplishments, sciences, religions, technologies and arts, exist in the same fashion.

The private psyche, the part of you that you do not recognize, is aware of those patterns even as it is aware of private physical biological patterns about which it forms your image.  Certain leanings, inclinations, and probabilities are present then in your biological structure, to be triggered or not according to your purposes and intents.  You may personally have the ability to be a fine athlete, for example.  Yet your inclinations and intents may carry you in a different direction, so that the necessary triggers are not activated.  Each individual is gifted in a variety of ways.  His or her own desires and beliefs activate certain abilities and ignore others.

The [human] species has built into it all of the knowledge, information, and “data” that it can possibly need under any and all conditions.  This heritage must be triggered psychically, however, as a physical mechanism such as a muscle is triggered through desire or intent.

This does not mean that you learn what in larger terms you already know; as for example, if you learn a skill.  Without the triggering desire, the skill would not be developed; but even when you do learn a skill, you use it in your own unique way.  Still, the knowledge of mathematics and the arts is as much within you as your genes are within you.  You usually believe that all such information must come from outside of your self, however.  Certainly mathematical formulas are not imprinted in the brain, yet they are inherent in the structure of the brain, and implied within its existence.  Your own focus determines the information that is available to you.  I will here give you an example.

Ruburt paints as a hobby.  Sometimes he paints for fairly long periods of time, then forgets about it.  Joseph is an artist.  Ruburt has been wondering about the contents of the mind, curious as to what information was available to it.  The Christmas holidays were approaching.  He asked Joseph what he would like for a gift, and Joseph more or less replied: “A book on Cezanne”.

Ruburt’s love for Joseph, his own purposes, and his growing questions, along with his interest in painting in general, triggered exactly the kind of stimulus that broke through conventional beliefs about time and knowledge.  Ruburt tuned in to Cezanne’s “world view”.  He did not contact Cezanne per se, but Cezanne’s comprehension of painting as an art.

Ruburt is not technically facile enough even to follow Cezanne’s directions.  Joseph is facile enough, but he would not want to follow the vision of another.  The information, however, is extremely valuable, and knowledge on any kind of subject is available in just such a manner – but it is attained through desire and through intent.

This does not mean that any person, spontaneously, with no instruction, can suddenly become a great artist or writer or scientist.  It does mean, however, that the species possesses within itself those inclinations which will flower.  It means also that you are limiting the range of your knowledge by not taking advantage of such methods.  It does not mean that in your terms all knowledge already exists, either, for knowledge automatically becomes individualized as you receive it, and hence, new.

Your desire automatically attracts the kind of information you require, though you may or may not be aware of it.

If you are gifted, and want to be a musician, for example, then you may literally learn while you are asleep, tuning in to the world views of other musicians, both alive and dead in your terms.  When you are awake, you will receive inner hints, nudges or inspirations.  You may still need to practice, but your practice will be largely in joy, and will not take as long as it might others.  The reception of such information facilitates skill, and operates basically outside of time’s sequences.

Ruburt’s Cezanne material therefore comes very quickly, taking a bare portion of the day.  Yet its quality is such that professional art critics could learn from it, though some of their productions might take much longer periods of time, and result from an extensive conscious knowledge of art, which Ruburt almost entirely lacks.  The productions of the psyche by their nature, therefore, burst aside many most cherished beliefs.

It seems almost heresy to suppose that such knowledge is available, for then what use is education?  Yet education should serve to introduce a student to as many fields of endeavor as possible, so that he or she might recognize those that serve as natural triggers, opening skills or furthering development.  The student will, then, pick and choose.  The Cezanne material was from the past, yet future knowledge is quite as accessible.  There are, of course, probable futures from the standpoint of your past.  Future information is theoretically available there, just as the body’s “future” pattern of development was at your birth – and that certainly was practical.