Magical Approach Session One

Magical Approach: Session One: Assembly-Line Time Versus Natural, Creative Time.  The Rational Mind Versus the Artistic Mind

August 6, 1980

We will, as always, begin in our own way.

In your latest series of interworkings, you and Ruburt, with your dreams and so forth, with Ruburt’s notes and your own, were both heading in the proper direction, dealing with issues that are important personally, and that also have a much broader impact.

The natural person is indeed the magical person, and you have both to some extent had very recent examples of such activity.  You were, and are, trying to teach yourselves something.  This is somewhat lengthy to unravel, but your behavior and experience, of course, is the result of your beliefs.  Framework 2 has been a rather fascinating but mainly hypothetical framework, in that neither of you have really been able to put it to any perceivable use in your terms.  This is not to say it has not been operating.  You have not had the kind of feedback, however, that you want.

When you were both intensely involved in your projects, just finished, you let much of your inner experience slide, relatively speaking.  The two of you operating together, however, then came up with an idea – an important one – that allows you to interpret the Framework 2 material in your own ways.  You had instant feedback – the interplay of a creative nature between the two of you involving your dreams and the camera, and so forth.  You were each struck by the magical ease with which you seemed, certainly, to perceive and act upon information – information that you did not even realize you possessed.

Some of Ruburt’s notes that you have not seen have further important insights as to such activity.  The main point is indeed the importance of accepting a different kind of overall orientation – one that is indeed not any secondary adjunct, but a basic part of human nature.  As your own and Ruburt’s notes state, Ruburt’s more clearly, this involves an entirely different relationship of the self you know with time.  You can make your own connections here, as per Ruburt’s camera experience, and your own dreams of late.

Important misunderstandings involving time have been in large measure responsible for many of Ruburt’s difficulties and also of your own, though they have been of a lesser nature.  All of this involves relating to reality in a more natural, and therefore magical, fashion.  There is certainly a kind of natural physical time in your experience, and in the experience of any creature.  It involves the rhythm of the seasons – the days and nights and tides and so forth.  In the light of that kind of physical time, which is involved within earthly biology, there is no basic cultural time.  That is, to this natural rhythm you have culturally added the idea of clocks, moments and hours and so forth, which you have transposed over nature’s rhythms.

Such a cultural time works well overall for the civilization that concentrates upon partialities, bits and pieces, assembly lines, promptness of appointments, and so forth.  It fits an industrialized society as you understand it.

The time that any artistic creator is involved with follows earth’s own time, however.  The creator’s time rises out of the seasons and the tides, even though in your society you make a great effort to fit the creator’s time into what I will call assembly-line time.  If you are a writer or an artist, then it seems that you must produce so many paintings or books or whatever as, say, an automobile worker must process so many pieces of the overall car chassis.  Particularly if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that “each minute is valuable” – but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production.  But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it.

Ruburt culturally has felt, for many reasons that have been discussed, that each moment must be devoted to work.  You have to some extent felt the same.  I said that the artistic creator operates in the time of the seasons and so forth, in a kind of natural time – but that natural time is far different than you suppose.  Far richer, and it turns inward and outward and backward and forward upon itself.

Being your own natural and magical self when you dream, you utilize information that is outside of the time context experienced by the so-called rational mind.  The creative abilities operate in the same fashion, appearing within consecutive time, but with the main work done outside of it entirely.  When you finished your project, you had several days of feeling miserable, but you caught yourself and turned yourself around beautifully, and have every right to congratulate yourself in that regard.

The same thing happened to Ruburt, and to some extent, with some individual variations, the same causes were involved.  When you were both working on those projects your cultural time was taken up in a way you found acceptable.  Creative time and cultural time to some extent merged, in that you could see daily immediate evidence of creativity’s product, coming out of typewriters, say, like any product off an assembly line.  You were “using” time as your cultural training told you to do.

When the projects were done, particularly with Ruburt, there was still the cultural belief that time should be so used, that creativity must be directed and disciplined to fall into the proper time slots.  In other words, to some extent or another he tried to use an assembly-line kind of time for your creative productivity.  This may work when manuscripts are being typed, and so much physical labor is involved, but overall you are using the “wrong” approach to time, particularly for any creative artist.  This again applies particularly to Ruburt, though you are not exonerated in that regard (said with some humor).

There is much material here that I will give you, because it is important that you understand the different ways of relating to reality, and how those ways create the experienced events.

You have not really, either of you, been ready to drastically alter your orientations, but you are approaching that threshold.  As Ruburt’s notes also mention, the “magical approach” means that you actually change your methods of dealing with problems, achieving goals, and satisfying means.  You change over to the methods of the natural person.  They are indeed, then, a part of your private experience.  They are not esoteric methods, but you must be convinced that they are the natural methods by which man is meant to handle his problems and approach his challenges.

I use the word “methods” because you understand it, but actually we are speaking about an approach to life, a magical or natural approach to life that is man’s version of the animal’s natural instinctive behavior in the universe.

That approach does indeed fly in direct contradiction to the learned methods you have been taught.  You have held on to those methods to varying degrees, since after all it seems that the world shares them.  They are understood ways of dealing with events.  Once again, however, with the experience of the last few days, you are both astonished by the magical ease by which work – real work – can be accomplished: events perceived out of place and time and so forth.

All of that can be transferred to other areas of your lives, and in particular to Ruburt’s [physical] difficulties, I do understand your joint concern, and in holding the session I know you want specific answers – which I always give to the best of my ability.

It certainly seems that the best way to get specific answers is to ask specific questions, and the rational mind thinks first of all of something like a list of questions.  In that regard, Ruburt’s response before such a session is natural, and to an extent magical, because he knows that no matter what he has been taught, he must to some degree forget the questions and the mood that accompanies them with one level of his consciousness, in order to create the proper kind of atmosphere at another level of consciousness – an atmosphere that allows the answers to come even though they may be presented in a different way than that expected by the rational mind.

What we will be discussing for several sessions, with your permission jointly – and, I hope, with your joint enthusiasm – will be the magical approach to reality, and to your private lives specifically, in order to create that kind of atmosphere in which the answers become experienced.

Trying to fit the great thrust of creativity into assembly-line time is in itself bound to lead to conflicts, dissatisfactions, and frustrations.  If the proper creative and magical orientation is kept primarily in mind, other things will fall into place.  You do not say to the creative self, “Now it is 7:30.  People are at their assembly lines.  I am at my desk: produce.”

Assembly-line time does not really value time – only as time can be used for definite prescribed purposes.  In that framework, to enjoy time becomes a weakness or a vice, and both of you to some extent have so considered time.  With creative people strongly gifted, as in your cases, the natural person is very prominent, no matter what you do.  It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience.  It knows, for example, how to enjoy each day, how to collect creative insights from each and every encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities.  It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints.

The natural person is anything but irrational.  It gathers all of experience together and transforms it, so many of your problems have been caused by applying the wrong kind of orientation to your lives and activities.

I say wrong, meaning no moral judgment, but the application of one method to a pursuit that cannot be adequately expressed in such a fashion.  The assembly-line time and the beliefs that go along with it have given you many benefits as a society, but it should not be forgotten that the entire framework was initially set up to cut down on impulses, creative thought, or any other activities that would lead to anything but the mindless repetition of one act after another.

In other words, that entire framework is meant to give you a standardized, mass-produced version of reality.  None of its concepts can rationally be applied to creative endeavors.  The orientation that gives you the creative achievement lies in the opposite direction.

Creativity itself has its own built-in discipline, the kind that, for example, in a dream can rummage through the days of the future to find precisely the data required to make a specific point.

All of this material applies to Ruburt’s condition, and an understanding of it will create the climate in which beneficial results can appear.

When Ruburt finished his project (God of Jane), he found himself with all of that time that was supposed to be used.  He also became aware once again of his limitations, physically speaking: There was not much, it seemed, he could do but work, so he took the rational approach – and it says that to solve the problem you worry about it.

At the same time, the natural person did emerge.  Ruburt followed his impulses and interpreted your dreams – all of which led you both into fresh creative activity.  But it was not work, you see.  What he needed to do was really relax, not prove that he could or should or must immediately begin another book.  True creativity comes from enjoying the moments, which then fulfill themselves, and a part of the creative process is indeed the art of relaxation, the letting go, for that triggers magical activity, and that is what Ruburt must learn.

I will have quite a bit to say, again, about the magical approach, and I do think the term will help each of you bring Framework 2 far more into your experience.  As far as Ruburt’s present situation, he should not wear, say, one pair of jeans for a week, but instead alternate, with two or three pairs that can be worn of course many times.

The underclothes are a poor kind, both for the weather and for someone whose motions are restricted.  He should also vary his nightwear more.  Your suggestion that he walk one more time, when he mentioned a program, was excellent.  It made him realize how limited his activity had become, and again following the prescribed rational prescription, he worried about it.

Then he contrasted his present position against the idealized desired one, all of which serve to lower his mood, and intensify his susceptibility to the heat, chair pressure, and so forth.

I want it understood that we are indeed dealing with two entirely different approaches to reality and to solving problems – methods we will here call the rational method and the magical one.  The rational approach works quite well in certain situations, such as mass production of goods, or in certain kinds of scientific measurements – but all in all the rational method, as it is understood and used, does not work as an overall approach to life, or in the solving of problems that involve subjective rather than objective measurements or calculations.

Those methods work least of all for any art.  It is a trite statement, perhaps, but the ruler’s measurements have absolutely nothing to do with the measurements made by the heart, and they can never be used to express the incalculable measurements that are made automatically by the smallest cell.

The rational mind alone, as it is presently used (because it is a rather artificial construct, a function given prominence), can never understand the dream measurements that you undertook in order to come up with the Brenner dream.

Ruburt kept a strong rational approach to make sure that he was keeping his psychic activity in line, because in your society this seemed the only rational thing to do.  Your problems have not been solved, then, largely of course because you have taken the wrong approach, and that is because you were jointly not convinced as yet.  You still held to those trained beliefs.  In that regard, Ruburt has suffered more than you have.

The old beliefs, of course, and the rational approach, are everywhere reinforced, and so it does indeed have great weight.  The magical approach has far greater weight, if you use it and allow yourselves to operate in that fashion, for it has the weight of your basic natural orientation.  The rational approach is the superimposed one.  I think that you are both ready to understand that.

In this session is material that will indeed allow Ruburt to get out of the present situation, but we will continue the discussion at our next session.  I have given you some such material before, as I intend to give you shortly.  With your own recent experiences, however, the material will be more meaningful and significant now, so that you can indeed put it this time to better use, and I will also be somewhat more specific.  I will also go into any questions you want regarding your later dreams or their implications.  It is good to be back with you again.  End of session, and a fond and magical good evening to you both.