Magical Approach Session Fifteen

Session Fifteen: The Natural Person and the Natural Use of Time

October 1, 1980

Our friend is now feeling somewhat more ambitious of late.  A few weeks ago, he could hardly wait to lie down at the appointed times, like it otherwise or no, simply because he was so uncomfortable.

Now, things have changed somewhat.  The sharp discomfort has gone.  A few weeks ago, he barely considered taking two steps in the kitchen, much less walking twice the length of the living room, or considering walking after dinner.

The fact that he is now thinking of walking after dinner is an obvious advance.  His irritability is somewhat natural – but also based on the idea, still, that when he is laying down that is dead time, or useless time, enforced inactivity.  It would help, of course, if he reminded himself that his creative mind is at work whether or not he is aware of it, and regardless of what he is doing, and that such periods have the potential, at least, of accelerating creativity, if he allows his intellect to go into a kind of free drive at such times.  You might have him become more aware of when he actually becomes tired, or uncomfortable, so that he does lay down then.

The walking after dinner would be excellent, of course – the idea being, however, that if he became uncomfortable from sitting that he lie on the bed, perhaps before watching television for the evening.

One important point, again, is to remember that in any given day his mood is often excellent for many periods of time.  He should concentrate his attention upon those periods, rather than concentrating upon the periods when he is blue or upset, and berating himself for those reactions.

In that way, the good moods become longer.  They increase.  They become significant. In such ways, he will discover what promotes those good moods.  Later, I will have some things to say about what I will call “the daily hypothesis”, for each person has such a daily hypothesis – one that might be quite different for say, Friday than it is for Monday.  You build your daily experience partially by such working hypotheses.

To some extent Ruburt’s dissatisfaction with laying down after dinner also means that he is learning more about his own natural rhythms, for he does feel accelerated at that time, and by the evenings, as you do.  This is because many of the beliefs that you have individually and jointly are somewhat relieved in the evening, in that they so often apply to the day’s activities, when the rest of the world seems to be engaged in the nine-to-five assembly-line world experience.

You do not project as many negative ideas upon the evening hours, and the same applies to most people to varying degrees.  That is at least one of the reasons why these sessions have been held in the evening, where it was at least not as likely that you would try to invest them with the workaday kind of world values.

That is also why it is easier, generally speaking, for Ruburt to receive such information in the evening, because you are jointly free of limitations that might hamper you at other times of the day – not simply that visitors might arrive more usually then, but because you yourselves are less visited by preconceptions of what you are supposed to do in any given hour of the day.

The natural, magical flows of your own rhythms are more often broken up in the daytime.  This applies to other people as well, because of your ideas of what you should be doing at any given time, or what is socially respectable, proper, upright, even moral in limited terms.

You have settled upon a system that seems to be naturally based, the exclusive results of your historic past, one in which your main activities are daytime ones.  It seems only natural that early man, for example, carried on all of his main activities in the day, hiding after dark.  As a matter of fact, however, early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the use of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept.  He also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his senses with high accuracy – the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.

In any case, man was not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night.  It was agriculture that turned him more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.

Many people’s natural rhythms, then, still do incline in those directions, and they are always kept operable as alternate rhythms for the species as a whole.

Ruburt has some inclinations in that direction, as do many creative people, but these rhythms are often nearly completely overlaid by culturally-learned ones.  Cultures that were night-oriented appreciated the night in a different fashion, of course, and actually utilized their consciousnesses in ways that are almost nearly forgotten.  I believe there are ancient fairy tales and myths still surviving that speak of these underworlds, or worlds of darkness – but they do not mean worlds of death, as is usually interpreted.

In a fashion, the intellect goes hand-in-hand with the imagination under such conditions.  It is not that man stressed physical data less, but that he put it together differently – that in the darkness he relied upon his inner and outer senses in a more unified fashion.  The nightly portions of your personalities have become strangers to you – for as you identify with what you think of as your rational intellect, then you identify it further with the daytime hours, with the objective world that becomes visible in the morning, with the clear-cut physical objects that are then before your view.

In those times, however, man identified more with his intuitive self, and with his imagination, and these to some extent more than now, directed the uses to which he put his intellect.

This meant, of course, a language that was in its way more precise than your own, for concepts were routinely expressed that described the vast complexity of subjective as well as objective events.  There were myriad relationships, for example, impossible now to describe, between a person and his or her dream selves, and between the dream selves of all the members of the tribe.  Particularly in warmer climates, man was naturally nocturnal, and did a good deal of his sleeping and dreaming in the daytime.

You must remember, of course, that the use of clocks is a fairly recent phenomenon.  Men thought in terms of rhythms of the time, or of flowing time, not of time in sections that were arbitrary.  So as far as creaturehood is concerned, you have adapted to a time environment that you yourselves have formed.  Creative people, again, are often aware of those connections, at least at certain levels, and Ruburt in particular has always felt that way to some extent.  You have largely buried your own natural feelings in that direction.

The sessions from the beginning were based upon the natural flow of Ruburt’s energy, taking advantage of it in such a fashion.