Session 900

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 900

There is, as I have told you, an inner “psychological” universe, from which your own emerges, and that universe is also the source of Framework 2 as well.  It is responsible for all physical effects, and is behind all physical “laws”.

It is not just that such an inner universe is different from your own, but that any real or practical explanation of its reality would require the birth of an entirely new physics – and such a development would first of all necessitate the birth of an entirely new philosophy.  The physics cannot come first, you see.

It is not [so much] that such developments are beyond man’s capacity as it is that they involve manipulations impossible to make for all practical purposes, from his present standpoint.  He could theoretically move to a better vantage point in the twinkling of an eye, relatively speaking, but for now we must largely use analogies.  Those analogies may lead you or Ruburt, or others, to a more advantageous vantage point, so that certain leaps become possible – but those leaps, you see, are not just leaps of intellect but of will and intuition alike, fused and focused.

The light of your questions is, in its way, an apport from that other inner universe.  In your world light has certain properties and limits.  It is physically perceived by the eyes, and to a far lesser degree by the skin itself.  In your world light comes from the sun.  It has been an exterior source, and in your world light and dark certainly appear to be opposites.

Ruburt glimpsed some of the principles involved when you were at [your downtown apartments] on several occasions – once when he tried to write a poem about the comprehensions that simply would not be verbalized.  I do not know how to explain some of this, but in your terms, there is light within darkness.  Light has more manifestations than its physical version, so that even when it may or may not be physically manifested there is light everywhere, and that light is the source of your physical version and its physical laws.  In a manner of speaking, light itself forms darkness.  Each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree, is, again, composed of energy – and that energy manifests itself with a kind of light that is not physically perceived: a light that is basically, now, far more intense that any physical variety, and a light from which all colors emerge.

The colors of which you are aware represent a very small portion of light’s entire spectrum, just physically speaking, but the spectrum you recognize represents only one inconceivably small portion of other fuller spectrums – spectrums that exist outside of physical laws.

So-called empty spaces, either in your living room between objects or the seemingly empty spaces between stars, are physical representations – or misrepresentations – for all of space is filled with the units of consciousness, alive with a light from which the very fires of life are lit.

The physical senses have to screen out such perceptions.  That light, however, is literally everywhere at once, and it is a “knowing light”, as Ruburt’s [William] James perceived.

On certain occasions, sometimes near the point of death, but often simply in conscious states outside of the body, man is able to perceive that kind of light.  In some out-of-body experiences Ruburt, for example, saw colors more dazzling than any physical ones, and you saw the same kind of colors in your dream.  They are a part of your inner senses’ larger spectrum of perception, and in the dream state you were not relying upon your physical senses at all.

In that dream worries were initially reflected – worries that your friend Floyd has also encountered on his own about virility and age, so you saw the two of you in a five-and-ten-cent store, simply representing the world of commerce, where items are sold: Did you still have a value in that world?  Were you still virile?  You were each to take your test.  Others saw you but were unconcerned, showing that the concern was your own, but also expressing the feeling that the world might not really care.

Instead of the test, you are greeted with a vision of the shimmering glass with its glowing colors and prisms, rich and intricate, representing the true source of life and sexuality itself – the vast multidimensional mosaic of which sexuality is but one facet.  You were viewing your representation of the many-faceted light of your own being.

The lamplight episode.  Here you did as you supposed.  You viewed that inner light, but the lampshades had two purposes: one, as you surmised, to give you a comforting image, literally to shade your eyes.  Ruburt was correct, however, in seeing the connection between the lampshades and the Nazi experiments (in World War II) with human skin.  The movie (on television last night), about cloning and Nazi atrocities, had made you wonder about the nature of life once again, and man’s immortality.  The connection with cloning came out in the lampshades made of (human) skins, in the old news stories – though your lampshades merely stood for those, and were fabric.  The connection was beneath, however, and also represented your feeling that even those people tortured to death did live again.  They were not extinguished.  Their consciousnesses were indeed like bulbs, say, turned on in new lamps.  The lights connected life and death, then.  The lights also represented pure knowing.

When I speak of an inner psychological universe, it is very difficult to explain what I mean.  In that reality, however, psychological activity is not limited by any of the physical laws that you know.  Thought, for example, has properties that you do not perceive – properties that not only affect matter, but that form their own greater patterns outside of your reality.  These follow their own, say, laws of physics.  You add on to, or build up your own reality, in other dimensions throughout your physical life.

The paintings that you have envisioned, for example, exist there, and they are every bit as real as the paintings in your studio.  I am not speaking symbolically here.  There is indeed light that you do not see, sound that you do not hear, sensation that you do not feel.  All of these belong to the realm of the inner senses.  The inner senses represent your true powers of perception.  They represent, say, your native nonphysical perceptive “equipment”.  The physical senses are relatively easy to distinguish:  You know what you see from what you hear.  If you close your eyes, you do not see.

The inner senses, though I have in the past described them by separating their functions and characteristics, basically operate together in such a way that in your terms it would be highly difficult to separate one from the others.  They function with a perfect spontaneous order, aware of all synchronicities.  In that psychological universe, then, it is possible for entities “to be everywhere at once”, aware of everything at once.  Your world is composed by such “entities” – the units of consciousness that form your body.  The kinds of conscious minds that you have cannot hold that kind of information.

These units of consciousness, however, add themselves up to form psychological beings far greater in number than, say, the number of stars in [your] galaxy, and each of those psychological formations has its own identity – its own soul if you prefer – its own purpose in the entire fabric of being.

That is as far as we can carry that for this evening.  We need some new carriers for the concepts.  But the light itself represents that inner universe, and the source of all comprehension.

Note 3: William James

See the passages following Jane’s entry for March 31, 1977, in Chapter 10 of her The After-Death Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James.

Session 899

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 899

While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed.  They did not have to operate under the law of gravity.  Men could wander as they wished about the landscape.  They did not identify themselves to any great degree as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures.  They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.

The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course it had set itself upon.  This awakening, again, happened spontaneously, and yet with its own order.  In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.  The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality.

The plants awakened before the animals – and there are reasons for these varying degrees of “wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of specieshood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness.  Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically effective world.

Again, the environment as you think of it is composed of living consciousness.  Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory.  Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what you think of as nature – the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land.  The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.

In a manner of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a manner of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface.  And in a manner of speaking, again, man becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his own thoughts, man in his way specializes in the conscious work of the world – a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him.  And when he thinks, man thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and the molecules, for the smallest particles within his being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.

Man thinks as naturally as the birds fly.  He looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes – but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.

What was it like when man awakened from the dream world?

CHAPTER 5: The “Garden of Eden”.  Man “Loses” His Dream Body and Gains A “Soul”

The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature.  He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him.  He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements – a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws.  He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place.  He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially shattering.  Yet [man] is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective.  He is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts.  He will grow the flower of the intellect – a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.

But man looked and felt himself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness.  Now he must find food, where before his dream body did not need physical nourishment.  Before, man had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality.  Man has to physically procreate.  Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division.  By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and Eve version of events.

On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality – a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree immersed.  Man’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that you now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity, the full capacity for the development of language – a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman, say, as it is in any man on a modern street.

But if man felt suddenly alone and isolated, he was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures.  Each creature apart from himself was a new mystery.  He was enchanted also by his own subjective reality, the body in which he found himself, and by the differences between himself and others like him, and the other creatures.  He instantly began to explore, to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his attention.

In a fashion, it was a great creative and yet cosmic game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness, but I want to emphasize that each version of All That Is is unique.  Each has its purpose, though that purpose cannot be easily defined in your terms.  Many people ask, for example: “What is the purpose of my life?” Meaning: “What am I meant to do?” but the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being.  That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.

Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it.  The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can – as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing.  The dream body does not die.  It exists before and after physical death.  In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms, but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived – and so, although they saw the picture of death, they did not recognize it as the death that to many people now seems an inevitable end.

[Men] saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue.  They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey”, seeing that each animal contributed so that the physical form of the earth could continue – but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men knew was its true form.  When man “awakened” in his physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside.  He retained memory of his earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he could now and then recapture that knowledge.  He became more and more aware of his physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant, and some were not.  Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

Basically, what made him feel good was good.  He was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him toward his own greatest development, to his own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he also helped to bring about the highest potentials of all of the other species of consciousness.  His natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him in just such a direction, so that he sought what was the best for himself and for others.

Session 898

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 898

The waking state as you think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of your awareness, just as your physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.

The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to you in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.

When you examine the state of dreams, however, you do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality.  You try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are your usual criteria for judging events.  Therefore, you are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when you “come awake” within your dreams – a matter we will discuss later on in this book.  But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that your own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization.  You think your thoughts and you dream your dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.

Also, in a manner of speaking, you are yourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed your world into being.  You must understand that I am not saying that you are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that you are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment – inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves.  Spontaneity knows its own order.

I have said that many times.  The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward.  In that regard, again, your dreaming state presents you with many clues about the source of your own lives and that of your world.

Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses.  Nor can any amount of information “possessed” by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument.  The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing.  It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream.  In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated.  It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.

You are subjectively “alive” before your birth.  You will be subjectively alive after your death.  Your subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that you call the waking one, in which you recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates.  Your greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe.  You create lives for yourselves, changing them as you go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots.  The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which creativity happens.  The processes occur at another level of consciousness.

In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into the physical one – and those processes happen at another level of consciousness.

Aside: Body Consciousness

Your body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal.  Mitzi running up and down the [cellar] stairs, is an example of the love of excitement and activity with which man and animals are innately endowed.  Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, and loved.  They react in their own ways to suggestion, and in that regard your body consciousness responds to your conscious treatment of it.  Think of your body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal … Animals and your own body consciousness have little concept of age.  In a fashion almost impossible to describe, [those] consciousnesses – of the body and the animals – are ‘young’ in each moment of their existences.  I am taking it for granted that you understand that I am referring to the ‘mental attitude’ of animals and of the body consciousness, for they do possess their own mental attributes – psychological colorations – and above all, emotional ‘states’.

Session 897

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 897

Again, your world was not created, then, by some exteriorized, objectified God who created it from the outside, so to speak, and set it into motion.  Many [religious] theorists believe, for example, that such a God created the world in such a fashion, and that the process of decay began at almost the same hypothetical moment that the creation ended.

Such an idea is much like some scientific ones, that see the universe running down, [with energy] being dissipated and order gradually disintegrating into chaos.  Both versions conceive of a finished creation, though one is a divine production and the other is a result of nothing more than happenstance.

All in all, however, we are speaking of a constant creation, even though I must explain it in serial terms.  We are discussing a model of the universe in which creation is continuous, spontaneously occurring everywhere, and everywhere simultaneously, in a kind of spacious present, from which all experiences with time emerge.  In this model, there is always new energy, and all systems are open, even though they may seem to operate separately.  Once again, also, we are considering a model that is based upon the active cooperation of each of its parts, which in one way or another also participate in the experience of the whole.

In this model, changes of form are the result of creative synthesis.  This model is seen to have its origin within a vast, infinite, divine subjectivity – a subjectivity that is within each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree.  A subjective divinity, then, that is within creation itself, a multidimensional creativity of such proportions that it is itself the creator and its creations at the same time.

This divine psychological process – and “process” is not the best word here – this divine psychological state of relatedness forms from its own being worlds within worlds.  Your universe is not the only one.  Nothing exists isolate in nature, and to that extent the very existence of your universe presupposes the existence of others.

These were, and are, and will be, created in the same fashion as that I have explained – and again, all such systems are open, even though operationally they may appear not to be.

There are literally infinite numbers of sequences, faultlessly activated, that make the existence of your own world possible.  I admit that it is sometimes inconceivable to me that a human being can imagine his world to be meaningless, for the very existence of one human body speaks of an almost unbelievable molecular and cellular cooperation that could hardly result through the bounty of the most auspicious works of chance.

In a manner of speaking, your universe and all others spring from a dimension that is the creative source of all realities – a basic dream universe, so to speak, a divine psychological bed where subjective being is sparked, illuminated, stimulated, pierced, by its own infinite desire for creativity.  The source of its power is so great that its imaginings become worlds, but it is endowed with a creativity of such splendor that it seeks the finest fulfillment, for even the smallest of its thoughts and all of its potentials are directed with a good intent that is literally beyond all imagining.

That good intent is apparent within your world.  It is obvious in the cooperative ventures that unite, say, the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, the relationship of bee to flower.  And your beliefs to the contrary, you have closed your minds to man’s own cooperative nature, to his innate desire for fellowship, his natural bent for taking care of others, and for altruistic behavior.

Session 896

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 896

A continuation of our discussion on suffering.

I feel sometimes as if I am expected to justify life’s conditions, when of course they do not need any such justification.

Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man’s psychology – knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering.  Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer.  Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences.  They are thirsty for experience of all kinds.  Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

Men and women are born with a desire to push beyond the limits – to “explore where no man has ever gone before” – a bastard version of the introduction [to a famous television program], I believe.  Men are women are born with a sense of drama, a need of excitement.  Life itself is excitement.  The quietest mood rides the thrust of spectacular molecular activity.

You forget many of your quite natural inclinations, feelings, and inner fantasies as you mature into adults, because they do not fit into the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species you have been taught to believe you are.  As a result, many of the events of your lives that are the natural extensions of those feelings appear alien, against your deepest wishes, or thrust upon you, either by outside agencies or by a mischievous subconscious.

The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind’s nature, but many adults do not remember childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

Children play at getting killed.  They try to imagine what death is like.  They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks.  They imagine tragic roles of which adults might approve.  They are often quite aware of “willing” themselves sick to get out of difficult situations – and of willing themselves well again.

They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later, when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to will themselves well again.

As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in between regular book dictation, in a very general manner.  In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves, wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or otherwise deprived themselves.  They suffered, in other words, for religion’s sake.  It was not just that they believed suffering was good for the soul – a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later – but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness.  So, they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimulus, and such a means in the overall will work against religious understanding.  Those episodes, however, represent one of the ways in which man can actively seek suffering as a means to another end, and it is beside the point to say that such activity is not natural, since it exists within nature’s framework.

Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used.  People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience.  It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it – and by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his heritage.  [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions.

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them – as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people – and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

Man’s vulnerability to pain helps him sympathize with others, and therefore helps him to more actively alleviate whatever unnecessary causes of pain exist in society.

That will be it for the evening.  My heartiest regards to each of you.  I have but one more point to make: Each person’s experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world’s mind.  Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world’s experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results.  So, in that way, even weaknesses or failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data.

In that regard, each person lives his or her life privately, and yet for all of humanity.  Each person tries out new challenges, new circumstances, new achievements from a unique viewpoint, for himself or herself, and for the entire mass of humanity as well.

Session 895

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 895

For many centuries the structure of the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together, and gave it its meanings and its precepts.  Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

The church’s view of reality was the accepted one.  I cannot stress too thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations, plants, and animals.  The world’s view was a religious one, specified by the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.

Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man his place by keeping him from the sins of pride.  Suffering sent by God was considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well.

Some other civilizations have believed that illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature itself, and that man had to walk a careful line lest he upset the more dangerous or mischievous of those entities.  In man’s history there have been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man believed were real in fact and in religious truth.

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your shoulders, wondering at man’s distorted views of reality.  The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted.  It is as laboriously conceived and interwound with “nonsense”.  It is about as factual as the “fact” that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

Churchmen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of indulging in particular sins.  Logical minds at one time found those diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the various sins that were involved.  The entire structure of beliefs made sense within itself.  A man might be born deformed or sickly because of the sins of his father.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also.  There are viruses, for example.  Your beliefs become self-evident realities.  It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration.  Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation – and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies.  Science, however, is all in all a poor healer.  The church’s concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity:  It did come from God – an unwelcome gift, perhaps – but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course.  In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against the species itself.  It meant you were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of questions not seriously asked before.

Did those “genetically inferior”, for example, have the right to reproduce?  Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of physical forces against which the individual had little recourse.  The “new” Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new dilemma, for it was then – as it is now – widely believed that as the result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious, might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality, and trick it into illness and disaster.

In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the metaphysical one.  If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real meaning, then suffering, of course, must be seen as meaningless.  The individual became a victim of chance insofar as his birth, the events of his life, and his death are concerned.  Illness becomes his most direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal existence.

You affect the structure of your body through your thoughts.  If you believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in your life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that you believed was there all along, until finally your scientific instruments uncover the “faulty mechanism”, or whatever, and there is evidence for all to see.

There are obviously some conditions that in your terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases you believe are hereditary – many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or rheumatoid disorders.  And in many cases of inherited difficulties, changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other mental methods that we will certainly get to someday.

There are as many kinds of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given.  As human creatures, you accept the conditions of life.  You create from those conditions the experiences of your days.  You are born into belief systems as you are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the freedom of interpreting the experiences of life in multitudinous fashions.  The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of suffering will be interpreted according to your systems of belief.  I hope to give you along the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it touches most deeply upon your hopes for yourselves and for mankind, and your fears for yourselves and for mankind.

You have taught yourselves to be aware of and to follow only certain portions of your own consciousness, so that mentally you consider certain subjects taboo.  Thoughts of death and suffering are among those.  In a species geared above all to the survival of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable, biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane.  Life is to be pursued at all costs – not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the only game going, and it is a game of chance at best.  One life is all you have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster, and war – and if you escape such drastic circumstances, then you are still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end.

In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing, or of chemicals reacting to chemicals.  Those beliefs alone bring on suffering.  All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s heart.  Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth.  It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.

I spoke about the quality of life, and it is true to say that in at least many centuries past, if men and women may have died earlier, they also lived lives of fuller, more satisfying quality – and I do not want to be misinterpreted in that direction.

Now, it is also true that in some of its aspects religion has glorified suffering, elevated it to [be] one of the prime virtues – and it has degraded it at other times, seeing the ill as possessed by devils, or seeing the insane as less than human.  So, there are many issues involved.

Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that man’s suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: You simply give the machine some better parts and all will be well.  Science also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in science itself will seemingly work miracles: The new heart will give a man new heart, for example.

Illness is used as part of man’s motivations.  What I mean is that there is no human motivation that may not at some time be involved with illness, for often it is a means to a desired end – a method of achieving something a person thinks may not be achieved otherwise.

One man might use it to achieve success.  One might use it to achieve failure.  A person might use it as a means of showing pride or humility, of looking for attention or escaping it.  Illness is often another mode of expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory.  Illnesses are often misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important.  [Sickness] can be a badge of honor or dishonor – but there can be no question, when you look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one, suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for one reason or another.

Most people do not seek out suffering’s extreme experience, but within those extremes there are multitudinous degrees of stimuli that could be considered painful, that are actively sought.  Man’s involvement in sports is an instant example, of course, where society’s rewards and the promise of spectacular bodily achievement lead athletes into activities that would be considered most painful by the ordinary individual.  People climb mountains, willingly undergoing a good bit of suffering in the pursuit of such goals.

I do not want any of this to appear too simplistic, but we must begin somewhere in this kind of discussion … This is far from the entire story [of illness], but it is enough for this evening’s saga.

Session 894

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 894

During this period that we have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions took place as the “structure” of earthly tuned consciousness formed the phenomena of “the self”.

What was needed was a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that was being formed along with physical creatures – a self, however, that in one way or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge of a kind that was basically independent of time and space.  A knowledge indispensable, and yet a knowledge that could not be allowed to distract the physical focus.

In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet.  Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind.  In your time scheme, for example, you could never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion – or in speech, or in any such bodily performance.  You certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if you first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered.  Yet you had to have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon your conscious thoughts.

Basically, there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms.  First of all, you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self – composed, again, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants.  These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions.  They were free of gravity and space, and of time.

As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment.  Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment.  The body was lovingly formed from the EE units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth.  The body’s pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other.

So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness.  To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge”, the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced.  The body consciousness is not “unconscious”, but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now, is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness.  The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness – the part delegated to the body.

[Each] cell, then, as I have often said, operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive.  It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of all other cells on the face of the planet.  It is aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms, it forms a portion of the earth’s consciousness.

At that level, environment, creatures, and the elements of the natural world are all united – a point we will return to quite often.  Your intellect as you think of it operates so clearly and precisely, so logically, sometimes so arrogantly, because the intellect rides that great thrust of codified, “ancient”, “unconscious” power – the power of instant knowing that is a characteristic of the body consciousness.

Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness.  As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre.

The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance.  The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder – and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak.  As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

The inner self was too aware of its own multidimensionality, so in your terms it gave psychological birth to itself through the body in space and time.  That portion of the self is the portion you recognize as your usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go.  That is the self that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch.  That is the self that lives the life of the body.

It is the self that looks outward.  It is the self that you call egotistically aware.  The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego.  It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both your own consciousness and your body consciousness emerged.

You are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that you have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body consciousness, and the consciousness that you know.

These portions, however, are intimately connected.  They are like three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the whole.  The divisions – the seeming divisions – are not stationary, but change constantly.

To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe.  In your terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom.  The inner self represents your prime identity, the self you really are.

“Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”  A twist on an old quote, I believe – but the fact is, you are physical creatures because you do like to live on earth, you do like the conditions, you do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides.

The environment, in your terms, certainly includes suffering.  If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in this book.  Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind – for the life of the body provides you, among all things, with a life of sensation, of feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible sensations within its overall range.

Now as you will see, all creatures, regardless of their degree, can and do choose, within their spheres of reality, those sensations that they will experience – but to one extent or another, all sensations are felt.  We will later discuss the part of the mind and its interpretation, for example, of painful stimuli, but I want to make the point that those attracted to physical life are first and foremost tasters of sensation.  Outside of that, basically, there are all kinds of mental distinctions made [among] stimuli.  The body is made to react.  It is made to feel life and vitality by reacting to an environment that is not itself, by encountering what you might call natural stress.  The body maintains its equilibrium by reacting against gravity, by coming in contact with other bodies, by changing its own sensations, by glorifying in the balance between balance and off-balance.

The body consciousness is therefore given a superb sense of its own reality, a sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it to not only function but to grow in the physical world.  It is endowed with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power.  It is perfectly formed to fit into its environment – and the environment is perfectly formed to have such creatures.

The entities, or units of consciousness – those ancient fragments that burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of All That Is – dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space and time.  They created new psychological entities, opened up an area of divine creativity that “until then” had been closed, and therefore to that [degree] extended the experience and immense existence of All That Is.  For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned, since they contained within themselves their inherent relationship with All That Is.  In those terms, All That Is became physical also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment of each creature’s existence.

All That Is, therefore, is immersed within your world, present in each hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion of matter is created.