Session 793

Chapter 10: Games That Anybody Can Play.  Dreams and the Formation of Events

Session 793

The brain is primarily an event-forming psycho-mechanism through which consciousness operates.  Its propensity for event-forming is obvious even in young children.  By obvious, I mean active, when fantasies occur involving activities far beyond the physical abilities as they are thus far developed.

Children’s dreams are more intense than those of adults because the brain is practicing its event-forming activities.  These must be developed before certain physical faculties can be activated.  Infants play in their dreams, performing physical actions beyond their present physical capacities.  While external stimuli are highly important, the inner stimuli of dream play are even more so.

Children practice using all of their senses in play-dreams, which then stimulate the senses themselves, and actually help ensure their coordination.  In your terms, events are still plastic to young children, in that they have not as yet learned to apply your stringent structure.  There is an interesting point connected with the necessity to coordinate the workings of the senses, in that before this process occurs there is no rigid placement of events.  That placement is acquired.  The uncoordinated child’s senses, for example, may actually hear words that will be spoken tomorrow, while seeing the person who will speak them today.

Focusing the senses in time and space is to some extent an acquired art, then – one that is of course necessary for precise physical manipulation.  But before that focusing occurs, children, particularly in the dream state, enjoy an overall version of events that gradually becomes sharper and narrower in scope.

A certain amount of leeway in space and time lingers, for even biologically the child is innately equipped with a “forevision” that allows it some “unconscious” view of immediate future events that forewarn it, say, of danger.  From this more plastic, looser experience, the child in dreams begins to choose more specific elements, and in so doing trains the senses themselves toward a more narrow sensitivity.

In periods of play the child actually often continues some games initiated quite naturally in the dream state.  These include role-playing, and also games that quite simply involve physical muscular activity.  All of this teaches a specification.  In dreams the mind is free to play with events, and with their formation.  The actualization of those events, however, requires certain practical circumstances.  In play the children try out events initiated in the dream state, and “judge” these against the practical conditions.  In such a way the child juggles probabilities, and also brings his physical structure precisely into line with a given niche of probability.  Basically in dreaming the brain is not limited to physically encountered experience.

Mentally it can form an infinite number of events, and consciously can take an infinite number of roles.  The child may easily dream of being its own mother or father, sister or brother, the family dog, a fly, a soldier.  In waking play the child will then try out those roles, and quickly see that they do not fit physical conditions.

Before a child has seen mountains it can dream of them.  A knowledge of the planet’s environment is an unconscious portion of your heritage.  You possess an unconscious environment, a given psychological world attuned to the physical one, and your learning takes place in it subjectively even as objectively you learn exterior manipulation.

The imagination is highly involved with event-forming.  Children’s imaginations prevent them from being too limited by their parents’ world.  Waking or dreaming, children “pretend”.  In their pretending they exercise their consciousness in a particularly advantageous way.  While accepting a given reality for themselves, they nevertheless reserve the right, so to speak, to experiment with other “secondary” states of being.  To some extent they become what they are pretending to be, and in so doing they also increase their own knowledge and experience.  Left alone, children would learn how to cope with animals by pretending to be animals, for example.  Through experiencing the animals’ reactions, they would understand how to react themselves.

In play, particularly, children try on any conceivable situation for size.  In the dream state adults and children alike do the same thing, and many dreams are indeed a kind of play.  The brain itself is never satisfied with one version of an event, but will always use the imagination to form other versions in an activity quite as spontaneous as play.  It also practices forming events as the muscles practice motion.

The brain seeks the richest form of an event.  I am speaking specifically of the brain, as separated from the mind, to emphasize the point that these abilities are of creaturehood.  The brain’s genius comes from the mind, which can be called the brain’s biophysical counterpart.

You have inner senses that roughly correlate with your physical ones.  These, however, do not have to be trained to a particular space-time orientation.

When children dream, they utilize these inner senses as adults do, and then through dreaming they learn to translate such material into the precise framework of the exterior senses.  Children’s games are always “in the present” – that is, they are immediately experienced, though the play events may involve the future or the past.  The phrase “once upon a time” is strongly evocative and moving, even to adults, because children play with time in a way that adults have forgotten.  If you want to sense the motion of your psyche, it is perhaps easiest to imagine a situation either in the past or the future, for this automatically moves your mental sense-perceptions in a new way.

EXERCISE

Children try to imagine what the world was like before they entered it.  Do the same thing.  The way you follow these directions can be illuminating, for the areas of activity you choose will tell you something about the unique qualities of your own consciousness.  Adult games deal largely with manipulations in space, while children’s play, again, often involves variations in time.  Look at a natural object, say a tree: if it is spring now, then imagine that you see it in the fall.

Alter your time orientation in other such exercises.  This will automatically allow you to break away from too narrow a focus.  It will to some extent break apart the rigid interlocking of your perception into reality as you have learned how to perceive it.  Children can play so vividly that they might, for example, imagine themselves parched under a desert sun, though they are in the middle of the coolest air-conditioned living room.  They are on the one hand completely involved in their activity, yet on the other hand they are quite aware of their “normal” environment.  Yet the adult often fears that any such playful unofficial alteration of consciousness is dangerous, and becomes worried that the imagined situation will supersede the real one.

Through training, many adults have been taught that the imagination itself is suspicious.  Such attitudes not only drastically impede any artistic creativity, but the imaginative creativity necessary to deal with the nature of physical events themselves.

Man’s creative alertness, his precise sensual focus in space and time, and his ability to react quickly to events, are of course all highly important characteristics.  His imagination allowed him to develop the use of tools, and gave birth to his inventiveness.  That imagination allows him to plan in the present for what might occur in the future.

This means that to some extent the imagination must operate outside of the senses’ precise orientation.  For that reason, it is most freely used in the dream state.  Basically speaking, imagination cannot be tied to practicalities, for when it is man has only physical feedback.  If that were all, then there would be no inventions.  There is always additional information available other than that in the physical environment.

These additional data come as a result of the brain’s high play as it experiments with the formation of events, using the inner senses that are not structured in time or space.

EXERCISE

Put another time on.  Just before you sleep, see yourself as you are, but living in a past or future century – or simply pretend that you were born 10 or 20 years earlier or later.  Done playfully, such exercises will allow you a good subjective feel for your own inner existence as it is apart from the time context.

EXERCISE

To encourage creativity, exert your imagination through breaking up your usual space-time focus.  As you fall to sleep, imagine that you are in the same place, exactly in the same spot, but at some point in the distant past or future.  What do you see, or hear?  What is there?

EXERCISE

For another exercise, imagine that you are in another part of the world entirely, but in present time, and ask yourself the same questions.  For variety, in your mind’s eye follow your own activities of the previous day.  Place yourself a week ahead in time.  Conduct your own variations of these exercises.  What they will teach you cannot be explained, for they will provide a dimension of experience, a feeling about yourself that may make sense only to you.

They will teach you to find your own sensations of yourself, as divorced from the official context of reality, in which you usually perceive your being.  Additionally, you will be better able to deal with current events, for your exercised imagination will bring information to you that will be increasingly valuable.

Do not begin by using your imagination only to solve current problems, for again, you will tie your creativity to them, and hamper it because of your beliefs about what is practical.

Playfully done, these exercises will set into action other creative events.  These will involve the utilization of some of the inner senses, for which you have no objective sense-correlations.  You will understand situations better in daily life, because you will have activated inner abilities that allow you to subjectively perceive the reality of other people in a way that children do.

There is an inner knack, allowing for greater sensitivity to the feelings of others than you presently acknowledge.  That knack will be activated.  Again, the powers of the brain come from the mind, so while you learn to center your consciousness in your body – and necessarily so – nevertheless your inner perceptions roam a far greater range. 

EXERCISE

Before sleep, then, imagine your consciousness traveling down a road, or across the world – whatever you want.  Forget your body.  Do not try to leave it for this exercise.  Tell yourself that you are imaginatively traveling.

If you have chosen a familiar destination, then imagine the houses you might pass.  It is sometimes easier to choose an unfamiliar location, however, for then you are not tempted to test yourself as you go along by wondering whether or not the imagined scenes conform to your memory.

To one extent or another your consciousness will indeed be traveling.  Again, a playful attitude is best.  If you retain it and remember children’s games, then the affair will be entirely enjoyable; and even if you experience events that seem frightening, you will recognize them as belonging to the same category as the frightening events of a child’s game.

Children often scare themselves.  A variety of reasons exist for such behavior.  People often choose to watch horror films for the same reason.  Usually the body and mind are bored, and actually seek out dramatic stress.  Under usual conditions the body is restored – flushed out, so to speak – through the release of hormones that have been withheld, often through repressive habits.

The body will seek its release, and so will the mind.  Dreams, or even daydreams of a frightening nature, can fulfill that purpose.  The mind’s creative play often serves up symbolic events that result in therapeutic physical reactions, and also function as post-dream suggestions that offer hints as to remedial action.

I mention this here simply to point out the similarity between some dreams and some children’s games, and to show that all dreams and all games are intimately involved with the creation and experience of events.

Session 792

Nature of the Psyche Session 792

In waking reality, you obviously share a mass world experience as well as a physical world environment.

Again, the events that you perceive come packaged in time sequences, so that you are used to a certain kind of before-and-after order.  When you build physical structures you pile brick upon brick.  It may seem that psychological events have the same kind of structure, since after all you do perceive them in time.

When you ask: “How are events formed?” you more or less expect an answer couched in those terms.  The answer is not that simple.  The origin of events lies in that creative, subjective realm of being with which you are usually least concerned.  This state of dreaming provides an inner network of communication, that in its way far surpasses your technological communications.  The inner network deals with another kind of perceptual organization entirely.  A rose is a rose is a rose.  In the dream state, however, a rose can be an orange, a song, a grave, or a child as well, and be each equally.

In dreams you deal with symbols, of course.  Yet symbols are simply examples of other kinds of quite “objective” events.  They are events that are what they seem to be, and they are equally events that do not “immediately” show themselves.  One so-called event, therefore, may be a container of many others, while you only perceive its exterior face – and you call that face a symbol.

The other events within the symbol are as legitimate as the one event you perceive.

Basically, events are not built one upon the other.  They grow out of each other in a kind of spontaneous expansion, a profusion of creativity, while the conscious mind chooses which aspects to experience – and those aspects then become what you call an objective event.

Events obviously are not formed by your species alone, so that, as I mentioned in our last session, there is a level of the dream state in which all earth-tuned consciousness of all species and degrees come together.  From your standpoint this represents a deep state of unconscious creativity – at the cellular levels particularly – by which all cellular life communicates and forms a vital biological network that provides the very basis for any “higher” experience at all.

What you call dreaming is obviously dependent upon this cellular communication, which distributes the life force throughout the planet.  The formation of any psychological event therefore depends upon this interspecies relationship.

The psychological symbols with which you are familiar in natural terms rise up like smoke, inherent in cellular structure itself.  In deepest terms animals and plants also process symbols and react to them.

Symbols can be called psychic codes that are interpreted in infinite fashion according to the circumstances in which consciousness finds itself.  Dream events “come together” in the same way that the universe does.  Events, therefore, cannot be precisely defined.  You can explore your own experience of an event, and that exploration itself alters the nature of the seemingly separate event that you began to investigate.  You share, then, a mass dream experience as you share a mass waking world.  Your daily experience is private and uniquely yours, yet it happens within the context of a shared environment.  The same applies to the dream state.

Your dreams are also uniquely yours, yet they happen within a shared context, an environment in which the dreams of the world occur.  In that context your own existence is “forever” assured.  You are the physical event of yourself put into a given space and time, and because of the conditions of that framework, within it you automatically exclude other experience of your own selfhood.  The greater event of yourself exists in a context that is beyond your usual perception of events.  The greater portion of yourself, however, forms the self that you know.

In the dream state you step into a larger context to some extent.  For that reason, you also lose the special kind of precise orientation with which you are familiar.  Yet you begin to sense, sometimes, the larger shape of events and the timeless nature of your own existence.

Individually and en masse, in the dream state you change the orientation of your consciousness, and deal with the birth of events which are only later time-structured or physically experienced.

First of all, physical events are the end products of nonphysical properties.

The formation of events is initially an emotional, psychic, or psychological function.  Events are physical interpretations, conventionalized versions of inner perceptive experiences that are then “coalesced” in space and time.  Events are organized according to laws that involve love, belief, intent, and the intensities with which these are entertained.

Events are attracted or repelled by you according to your loves, beliefs, intents, and purposes.  Your world provides a theater in which certain events can or cannot occur.  Wars, violence, disasters -these are obviously shared by many, and are a part of your shared psychological and physical environment.

Some people encounter war directly, however, in terms of hand-to-hand combat, or bombing.  Others are only inconvenienced by it.  Here the mass shared environment is encountered as physical reality according to individual belief, love, and intent.  In the deepest meaning there is no such thing as a victim, either of war, poverty, or disease.  This does not mean that those negative qualities should not be combatted, for in the terms of conventional understanding it certainly appears that men and women are victims in many such cases.  Therefore, they behave like victims, and their beliefs reinforce such experience.

Certainly for more than the hundredth time I say: “Your beliefs form your reality”, and this means that your beliefs structure the events you know.

Such experience then convinces you more thoroughly of the reality you perceive until a vicious circle is formed, in which all events mirror beliefs so perfectly that no leeway seems to appear between the two.

If this was really the case, however, mankind’s history would never change in in any true regard.  Alternate paths of experience – new possibilities and intuitive solutions – constantly appear in the dream state, so that man’s learning is not simply dependent upon a feedback system that does not allow for the insertion of creative material.  Dreaming otherwise available, in which behavior and events can be judged against more developed and higher understanding than that present in conventional daily reality at any level.

There may be, for example, complications arising from a person’s intents, loves, and desires that cause the individual to seek certain events that his or her very beliefs make impossible.  Current experience will provide a dilemma in which a desired goal seems impossible.

In such instances a dream, or a series of them, will often then alter the person’s beliefs in a way that could not otherwise occur, by providing new information.  The same data might come in a state of inspiration, but it would in any case be the result of an acquisition of knowledge otherwise inaccessible.  Love, purpose, belief, and intent – these shape your physical body and work upon it and with it even as at other levels cellular consciousness forms it.

Love is a biological as well as a spiritual characteristic.  Basically, love and creativity are synonymous.  Love exists without an object.  It is the impetus by which all being becomes manifest.  Desire, love, intent, belief and purpose – these form the experience of your body and all the events it perceives.  You cannot change one belief but it alters your body experience.  The great give-and-take between biological and psychological integrity occurs constantly.  Your thoughts are as active as your cells, and as important in maintaining your physical being.

Your thoughts are also as natural as your cells.  Your thoughts propel you toward survival and growth also, and in the same way that your cells do.  If you find yourself in physical difficulties health-wise, you cannot say: “Why doesn’t my body stop me and assert its own wisdom?” because in the truest sense there is no division between your thoughts and your body.  You are given the ability to think, as you are given the ability to move.  Your thoughts multiply even as your cells do.  Your thinking is meant to ensure your survival in those terms, as much as your body mechanism.

The give-and-take between the two occurs largely in the dream state, where constant translations of data occur.  Your thoughts and your body cells are reflected one in the other.

I am going to suggest a series of exercises.  They should be regarded as creative exuberant games.  They will acquaint you with your psyche, or your own greater experience of yourself, by helping you shift your attention to aspects of your own experience that usually escape your notice.

The exercises will not work, however, in the way they are meant to if they are embarked upon with too serious an air or intent.  They should be considered as creative play, though of a mental nature, and they actually consist of mental endeavors tried quite spontaneously by children.  So they are not to be regarded as esoteric accomplishments.  They represent the intent to discover once again the true transparent delight that you once felt in the manipulation of your own consciousness, as you looped and unlooped it like a child’s jumping rope.

The dream state is the source of all physical events, in that it provides the great creative framework from which you choose your daily actuality.

Children quickly learn from their parents that experience must be structured in a certain conventional pattern.  In their own periods of imaginative play, however, children utilize dream events, or events perceived in dreams, while clearly realizing that these are not considered actual in the “real” world.

Physical play is pleasant, and accompanied by high imaginative activity.  Muscles and mind are both exercised.  The same kind of activity occurs in the child’s dream state as it learns to handle events before they are physically encountered.  Intense dream activity is involved.  Some dream events are more real to the child than some waking events are – not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he or she is still so close to the emotional basis behind events.  Some of the exercises I will suggest will put you in touch with the way events are formed.

Children’s play, creativity, and dreams all involve you with the birth of events in the most direct fashions.  The games that you play or habitually observe will, of course, tell you much about the kind of organization that occurs in your own experience.  Overall, you organize events around certain emotions.  These can be combative, in which there will always be good teams and bad teams, salvation or destruction, winning or losing.

The events of your life will follow the love of performance, of body or imagination, for performance’s sake only; the expansion of mental or physical abilities.  The most satisfying of events involve those characteristics.  The exercises I will suggest have to do with games “that anybody can play”, then – with the natural joyful manipulation of the imagination that children employ.

Session 791

Nature of the Psyche, Session 791

Pretend that you are a fine actor, playing in a multidimensional theater, so that each role you take attains a vitality far surpassing the creative powers of any ordinary play.

Each of you is embarked upon such an endeavor.  You lose yourselves in your parts.  You are also involved in a kind of creative dilemma, since in a manner of speaking you confuse yourself as the actor with the character you play so convincingly that you are fooled

You say: “I must maintain my individuality after death”, as if after the play the actor playing Hamlet stayed in that role, refused to study other parts or go on in his career, and said: “I am Hamlet, forever bound to follow the dilemmas and the challenges of my way.  I insist upon maintaining my individuality”.

In the dream state the actors become aware to some extent of the parts they play, and sense the true personal identity that is behind the artist’s craft.  I have spoken of this before, but it is important to remember that you impose a certain kind of “artificial” sense of exaggerated continuity even to the self you know.  Your experience changes constantly, and so does the intimate context of your life – but you concentrate upon points of order, in your terms, that actually serve to scale down the context of your experience to make it more comprehensible.  There are no such limits naturally set about your consciousness.

You have a mass psychological environment that forms your worldly culture, and corresponds to a worldly stage set in which experience then occurs.  Certain psychological conventions act as props.  There are, then, more or less formal psychological arrangements that are used as reference points, or settings.  You group your experience within those arrangements.  They serve to shape mental events as you physically perceive them.

The last sentence is important, for in your lifetimes your experience must be physically felt and interpreted.  Despite this, however, events spring from a nonphysical source.  As mentioned earlier, your recalled dreams are already interpretations of other nonphysical events.

Putting this as simply as possible, your actual experience is far too vast for you to physically follow.  Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of specialized focus within a particular area.  You imagine it to be “absolute”, in that it seems to involve an all-exclusive state that includes your identity as you think of it – only you give it boundaries like a kingdom.  It is, instead, a certain kind of organization that is indeed inviolate even while it is itself a portion of other kinds of consciousness, with their own points of focus.  Your body itself is composed of self-aware organizations of consciousness that escape your notice and deal with perceptual material utterly alien to your own ways.

There are affiliations of a most “sophisticated” fashion that leap even the boundaries of the species.  You look upon your cultural world with its art and manufacture, its cities, technology, and the cultivated use of the intellectual mind.  You count your religions, sciences, archaeologies, and triumphs over the environment, and it seems to you that no other consciousness has wrought what man’s has produced.  Those “products” of your consciousness are indeed unique, creative, and form a characteristic mosaic that has its own beauty and elegance.

There are organizations of consciousness, however, that leapfrog the species, that produce no arts or sciences per se – yet these together form the living body of the earth and the physical creatures thereon.  Their products are the seas upon which you sail your ships, the skies through which your airplanes fly, the land upon which your cities sprawl, and the very reality that makes your culture, or any culture, possible.

Man is a part of that trans-species consciousness also, as are the plants and animals.  Also, part of man’s reality contributes to that trans-species organization, but he has not chosen to focus his practical daily consciousness in that direction, or to identify his individuality with it.  As a result, he does not understand the greater natural mobility he himself possesses, nor can he practically perceive the natural psychological gestalts of which he is a part, that form all of your natural – meaning physical – world.

In dreams this relationship often is revealed.  The truth behind such relationships is inherent in all God-Man, God-Woman, Animal-Man, or Animal-Woman legends and mythology.  There are connections, then, between man and the animals and the so-called gods, that hint at psychological and natural realities.

Any section of the land has an identity, so to speak, and I am not talking symbolically.  Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm.  Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousness as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions.  In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama.  Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess.  It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity – stamped, as it were, with your identity.

Whether dispersed, concentrated in a tight grouping, appearing “alone” of flying through other larger swarms, that particular organization represents your identity.

Using an analogy, its “particles” could be dispersed throughout the universe, with galaxies between, yet the identity would be retained.  So unknowingly, now, portions of your consciousness mix and merge with those of other species without jarring your own sense of individuality one whit – yet forming other psychological realities upon which you do not concentrate.

In the dream state, animals, men, and plants merge their realities to some extent so that information belonging to one species is transferred to others in an inner communication and perception otherwise unknown in your world.

The natural structures of the earth are formed as the result of the biological cooperation of all species, and consciousness itself is independent of any of the forms that it may at one time or another assume.

Therefore, at levels that would appear chaotic to you, there is a great mixing and merging of consciousness, a continual exchange of information, so to speak; an open-ended exploration of possibilities, from which in your terms events privately and en masse emerge.

I am simply explaining the characteristics, aptitudes, abilities, and tendencies of Nature.  There are so many different levels in what you call the dream state that they are impossible to list, except in stereotyped ways.  This is particularly because some dream sequences involve biological comprehensions that are not literally translatable.

It has been truthfully said that the “unconscious” is intimately aware of the most minute details of your health, state of mind, and relationships.  “It” is also aware of the state of the earth’s health – even of the environmental conditions on the other side of the planet.  It is familiar with the cultural climate also.  Your recognized consciousness operates as it does because of immense information-gathering procedures – procedures that unite all species.  Biologically such information is coded, but that physical information, such as in the genes and chromosomes, can be altered through experience and mental activity in other species as well as your own.

On the one hand, dreaming on the part of animals – and men in particular – involves not only information processing, but information gathering.  Dreaming prevents life from becoming closed-ended by opening sources of information not practically available in the waking state, and by providing feedback from other than the conventional world.  Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity.  These [other consciousnesses] are dispersed in like manner.

In such ways each individual maintains a picture of the ever-changing physical and psychological mass environment.  Physical events as you understand them could not exist otherwise.  Basically, information is experience.  In dreams, you attain the necessary information to form your lives.  That state of sleep, therefore, is not simply the other side of your consciousness, but makes your waking life and culture possible.

Death operates in the same fashion.  The animals in particular realize this because they organize time differently from you.  Dreaming provides all the conditions of life and death, therefore – a fact that often frightens the waking self.  But here is a creative mixture: the perceptive organizations from which prosaically tuned conscious life emerges.  Here are the raw materials for all the daily events you recognize privately and on a world scale.

In nature nothing is wasted, so the luxurious growth of man’s dream landscapes is also utilized.  Whether or not these are physically actualized, they have their own reality.  Your own personalities are to some extent the result of your waking experience.  But they are also formed equally by your dreaming experience, by the learning and knowledge and encounters that occur when many would tell you that you are beyond legitimate perception.  Dreams, then, are deeply involved with the learning processes.  Dreams of walking and running occur in infants long before they crawl, and serve as impetuses.

In rudimentary form children’s dreams also involve mathematical concepts, so that formal mathematical training falls on already fertile grounds.  The arts, sciences, agriculture – all of these reflect natural contours and tendencies inherent in man’s mind, as general rather than specific attributes emerging first in the dream state, and then sparking specialized intellectual tendencies in the waking state.

Cities, therefore, exist in dreams before the time of tribes.  The dream state provides the impetus for growth, and opens up to the earth-tuned consciousness avenues of information for its physical survival.

Because that state is also connected with waking life, you also take into it many of the elements of your daily existence, so that your recalled dreams are often cast in fairly conventional terms.  As a rule, you remember the dream’s outer veneer, or what it turns into as you approach your usual level of consciousness.  In a dream you are basically aware of so many facets of an event that many of them must necessarily escape your waking memory.  Yet any real education must take into consideration the learning processes within dreams, and no one can hope to glimpse the nature of the psyche without encouraging dream experience, recall, and the creative use of dream education in waking life.

Session 790

Nature of the Psyche, Session 790

There are vast distances of a psychological and psychic nature separating my reality from your own.  To some degree Ruburt’s mind is the connective between us.  As I speak in sessions, therefore, I am not entirely myself.

I am what I am, interpreted through your reality.  I have personality characteristics by which those who have come to sessions can identify me.  I have a peculiarity of voice and accent that is, if I may say so myself, unique and individualistic.  Yet I come to your reality by a strange route – one that does not involve roads or highways but psychological dramas that wind backward like paths into the “psychological history” of your species.  To some extent, I am like a particularly vivid, persistent, recurring dream image, visiting the mass psyche, only with a reality that is not confined to dreams – a dream image that attains a psychological fullness that can seem to make ordinary consciousness a weak apparition by contrast, psychologically speaking.

We have been speaking of dream events and waking reality, the nature of creativity and the formation of events.  We have also touched upon psychological entities of vast proportions, in your terms, that form psychological structures from which your own reality emerges.  In that connection, the nature of my reality becomes pertinent.

I am not speaking here of gods, but of psychological structures different from the ones you know.  They cannot directly perceive or experience your reality in their “present” form of organization.  In a manner of speaking they are in the background, from which the foreground of your experience emerges.  They appear in your dreams in various ways.  They are like the cloth from which you are cut.  They are forces which have no need of names except for your convenience.

Those psychological structures are also great energy activators, and as such are important initiators of events.  They are seldom if ever physically materialized.  Yet they are very responsive to the psychic needs of the people, and so they “appear” at various times in history with certain messages, in the same way that certain dreams might reoccur in a private mind.

In the most cosmic and most minute ways, physical experience springs from inner reality.  Events are initiated from within and then appear without.  In your terms I have no physical existence.  These books, however, initiate quite physical events as readers learn to take better control of their lives, expand their consciousnesses, and become aware of their own greater abilities.

You may say if you wish that I am a dream image lacking even an image – but if so, then each individual whose life is changed by my worlds must question: “What is a dream?”  In the same way that my personality exists without physical manifestation, so does your own.  Your dreaming and waking experience has a direct effect upon the entire universe.  The difference is that you are not consciously aware of what you are doing, but I am.  I change a world to some extent, though in your terms I will not actually sit in a chair or walk the streets, or shake your hand, or see the twilight come, or the sun rise.

To me your world is a dream universe which I visit by invitation, a probable reality that I find unique and very dear – but one in which I can no longer have direct experience.  Because I am not as immersed in it as you, I can tell you much about it, since your precise orientation necessitates a more narrow, concentrated view.

Now in your dreams you often visit other such realities, but you have not learned to organize your perception, or direct it.  If entities like myself form the background of your own existence, so do entities like yourselves act as the background psychological structures in which other such organizations exist.  There is always a give-and-take in all such relationships.

Your kind of psychological reality is therefore implied in my own, and mine in yours, even as your kind of reality is implied in that of Willy Two (our kitten) – and his in yours.

It is not easy to explain the workings of the inner psyche, or the activity behind dreams, for such experience exists beyond the framework of verbalization or images, and deals basically with the nature and behavior of psychological and psychic energy.

I am a personified energy source – but so are you.  I have had many lives, in your terms, yet in other, terms I have not lived physically, but rather lent or loaned my energy to lives that rose from my reality but were not me.  In the same way you give birth to dream images of your own – hardly aware that you have done so, unconscious of the fact that you have provided impetus for a kind of psychological reality that quite escapes your notice.  The dream stories you begin continue on their own.  No dream is stillborn.  Each chapter of this book is written in such a way that the ideas presented will activate your own intuitions, and open pathways between your dreaming and waking states.

Your own greater reality hovers about you in each instant.  If you knew in precise terminology how you grew physically from a fetus to an adult, if you could consciously follow that process, you would not necessarily be better off, but possibly hindered in your growth; for you would begin to question: “Am I doing this right?”  The perfection of the process would make you ill at ease.

In the same way, a step-by-step illustration of the nature of the dream state might well make you too self-conscious.  You would begin to question: “Am I dreaming right?”

Many people are in awe of their dreams.  They are afraid of anything they do not consciously control.  Yet if you think of your dreams as extensions of your own experience in another context, then you can indeed learn to gain ease with them.  You will recall them more easily, and as you do you will be able to maintain a sense of continuity between the waking and dream states.

As this happens the contours of your own psyche will appear more clearly.  Those contours will not show themselves in terms of definite mathematical-like propositions, however, but will emerge through the techniques, symbols, feelings, and desires usually attributed to creativity.

The characteristics of creativity appear most clearly in children.  Creativity implies abandon within a framework that is accepted for itself, and itself only.

EXERCISE

If in your waking hours you playfully make up a dream for yourself, and then playfully interpret it without worrying about implications, but for itself only, you will unwittingly touch upon the nature of your own nightly dreaming.  Your regular dreams and your “manufactured” ones will have much in common, and the process of manufacturing dreams will acquaint you with the alterations of consciousness that to a greater degree happen nightly.  This is an excellent exercise.  It is particularly beneficial for those who have a too-rigid mental framework.

The playfulness and creativity of dreams are vastly underrated in most dream studies.  Children often frighten themselves on purpose through games, knowing the game’s framework all the time.  The bogeyman in the garden vanishes at the sound of the supper bell.  The child returns to the safe universe of tea and biscuits.  Dreams often serve the same purpose.  Fears are encountered, but the dawn breaks.  The dreamer awakes for breakfast.  The fears, after all, are seen as groundless.  This is not an explanation for all unpleasant dreams by any means, yet it is a reminder that not all such events are neurotic or indicative of future physical problems.

Ruburt and Joseph have a kitten.  In its great exuberant physical energy, it chases its own tail, scales the furniture, tires itself out – and man’s mind exuberantly plays with itself in somewhat the same fashion.  In dreams it uses all those splendid energetic abilities freely, without the necessity for physical feedback, caution, or questioning.  It seeks realities, giving birth to psychological patterns.  It uses itself fully in mental activity in the same way that the kitten does in physical play.

When you try to explore the psyche in deadly seriousness, it will always escape you.  Your dreams can be interpreted as dramas, perhaps, but never as diagrams.

Do not try to bring “dream interpretation” – and kindly, now – down to your level, but instead try to playfully enter that reality imaginatively, and allow your own waking consciousness to rise into a freer kind of interpretation of events, in which energy is not bounded by space, time, or limitations.

Session 789

Nature of the Psyche, Session 789

What I called the predream state here is actually one in which you are always immersed whether you are waking or sleeping, or whether in your terms you are alive or dead.  It involves conditions in which direct knowing primarily operates.

It is your natural state of being.  In its larger aspects, then, nature involves states that include both life and death in far more expansive frameworks of reference.

This is characterized perhaps most of all by more perceptive psychological organizations.  In the predream state you participate in such organizations, although you bring back home to your physical self – in the form of dreams – only data that can be recognized and used in physical terms.  It is highly important to remember that your experience and knowledge grow at those other levels of actuality.  Even during your physical lifetime your experience is not confined to conventional physical events alone.  Those usual events arise from the creative impetus that occurs at these other levels.

Please understand: I am not saying here that you have no conscious control over events, for they are formed by you in accordance with your feelings, beliefs, purposes, and intents.

The inner material that “makes events real” comes from these other sources, however.  Most of you are not aware of this basic, mysterious nature of events, because it does not occur to you to study the inner fabric.  The past and future of any given event provides a kind of thickness, a kind of depth-in-time.  The probabilities of an event escape you in practical terms.

In the predream state you directly encounter a reality in which those probabilities exist all at once to your perception.  In a dazzling display you are aware of such events from infinite perspectives.  Consciously you could not grasp such information, much less act upon it, nor could you maintain your particular, unique, psychological stance.  You still take advantage of that level of being, however, using that immeasurable data as a basis to form the reality that you know.

To some extent your dreaming state is a connective between the kind of life you recognize and this far vaster dimension that is its source.  Dreaming involves a far greater input of information than is realized, then – that is, you take in far more data when you are dreaming than when you are awake, although the data are of a different kind.  The dreams themselves are further processed so that they become a fabric for recognizable waking events.

Dream dramas are highly complicated, artistic productions.  On the one hand they represent other events of the predream state, events beyond your comprehension in their “natural condition”.  Such events are not lost, however, but translated into dreams as your own consciousness returns closer to its “home base”.  Each aspect of a dream stands in coded form as a symbol for greater, undecipherable events.

The symbols are so precisely and accurately produced that they simultaneously serve as aspects relating to your intimate daily life as well.  Since everyday events are formed in part as a result of such dream information, then each event of your physical life is also a symbol for another otherwise undecipherable event that occurs in those levels of the psyche in which your own being is immersed.

This in no way denies the validity of events as you think of them, for all of your physical activity immediately alters all other relationships at all levels of being.  Most of you are familiar with inspiration in one form or another.  People who are not writers or artists, poets or musicians, often suddenly find themselves almost transformed for a brief period of time – suddenly struck by a poem or a song or a snatch of music, or by a sketch – that seems to come from nowhere, that seems to emerge outside of the context of usual thought patterns, and that brings with it an understanding, a joy, a compassion, or an artistic bent that seemingly did not exist a moment earlier.  Where did the song or poem or music come from?  Such individuals feel that they suddenly “know” in a direct manner.  They experience knowledge that comes from within rather than information that comes from without.

Now the dream comes in the same fashion.  You do not have to wonder about how to form a dream before you go to bed at night.  You do not have to know any of the mechanisms involved, so dreaming often seems to “just happen” in the same way that an inspiration seems to just come.

Books have been written about the nature of dreams.  There are classic accounts of precognitive dreams, or prophetic dreams involving saints and honored personages in the Bible.  Yet each dream alters the physical world to some extent.  A creative idea might lead to a book – certainly a physical-enough production.  Dreams involve you with the most intimate mechanics by which physical events are formed.  There are hormonal and chemical changes occurring in the body – often at minute but important levels – in direct response to dream experience.  Your dreams then are tied into your biological makeup.  There are also coded biological connections within dream images themselves that relate to cellular activity – not generally, but specifically.

Each dream object is chosen with the highest discrimination so that it serves as a symbol at many levels, and also sends pertinent messages to the individual cells and organs of the body as well.

I want to discuss the connections between creativity, dreams, and the actual formation of physical events.  At the same time, I understand your need for some kind of precise terminology, even while I know that in certain terms the more “precise” I become for your benefit, the more we may miss of greater issues that escape such boundaries.  I also want to avoid many preconceptions that are connected with certain words.

Nevertheless, in dreams you are intimately connected with the processes by which physical events are formed.  Events, again, gain their characteristics from those significances that you place upon the universe as your own being impresses it with your beliefs, desires, and individual nature.

As a continent does not exist alone, but also in relationship to other physical formations, so in your terms you form events so that they fit into a mass framework.  You form your own reality.  You do not form it isolated and alone, however.  You are aware of other events, and take them into consideration, for example, regardless of appearances.  You cannot force another person to experience an event he or she rejects.  Nor can anyone act in like manner against you.  So-called good or bad events each faithfully follow the inner mechanics.

In order to become physical, probable events must meet certain conditions, as it were.  They must fall into the proper time and space slots.  There must be a psychological fit also, certain intensities reached in terms of desire, belief, or intent.  By intensity I do not necessarily mean effort, vehement desire, or determined conscious intent.  I mean instead the collection of certain intangible qualities, precisely focused toward physical activity.

Physical events imply the collection of basically nonphysical forces into an organization that exists initially outside of the time-space context.  This is a psychological organization, consisting of a selection of chosen probable events.  These wait in the wings, so to speak, for physical actualization.  The final trigger for that actualization may come from the waking or dream states, but it will represent the final factor needed – the quickening of inspiration, desire, or purpose – that will suddenly activate the initial psychological organization as a physical occurrence.

The EE units which I have mentioned in other material are important because they exist in an electromagnetic sphere of activity, and they trigger certain responses in the brain and nervous system.  Events themselves involve a steady condition of highly related fields of activity, however, that exist between the EE units, so to speak.

These fields involve psychological reactions, not physically perceivable, and yet as explosive in their way as a nuclear detonation.  That is, these psychological activities “explode” into physical events by virtue of a transformation and a charge that allows purely mental acts to “break the time-space barrier” and emerge as realities in a physical world.  In a way the EE units occur on the furthest reaches of this activity.  If an event were a physical craft such as a spaceship, the EE units would allow it to land in your world, but would not be the original propellants.  Those propellants are psychic fields of interrelationship.

Let us use an analogy.  Pretend that you are a planet, as indeed in certain terms you are.  You exist in a highly complicated and sophisticated universe.  You know that space is filled with all kinds of inhabitants, and we will compare these space inhabitants to probable events.  As a planet you have certain characteristics.  Some space inhabitants would not be able to land under those conditions at all.  The conditions represent your own psychological individuality.  You send out messages to the stars because you are lonely, and events or visitors are one of your main methods of gaining experience and knowledge.  To land their own rocket ships, space travelers must enter your atmosphere and use its conditions while maintaining their own integrity.  They must also have their own reasons for such a visit.

Now any physical event is something like the impact of a rocket ship entering your world from “somewhere else”.  Thoughts often seem to swim in and out of your system of consciousness, and you barely notice.  Events often appear and disappear in the same manner, yet they have impressed your reality.  You have attracted them to one extent or another, and they have been attracted to you.  Momentarily a field of relatedness is set up that is highly charged, one that provides an inner path by which probable events can flow into your area of recognized events.

This path exists on psychological levels, and triggers your perceptive mechanisms, which then of course react and dutifully perceive.  Your intent or purpose or belief is one of the main attractions.  These serve as beams searching the universe, but the conditions of manifestation also exist.  There must be a proper fit.

First of all, your own universe is not isolated, either.  It is simply the one that you perceive.

There are in a basic sense other universes within the one that you recognize, and constantly happening in those universes are other events of which you are unaware.  The universes exist one within the other, so to speak, and their events also one within the other, so that while any given event seems itself only in the terms that you recognize, it is a part of endless others that exist one within the other, and it is impossible at certain levels to separate the “portions”.

Your daily life seems to give you little evidence of this.  Your dreams, however, often contain this kind of interrelatedness.  Because you perceive events in the way that you do, of course, you see the familiar physical universe.  Dream events, not as precise in space and time, often serve as a framework through which some evidence of other universes can be glimpsed.  No system is closed, so there are interactions, so to speak, between all universes.  No psychological system is closed either, even while it retains an inviolate nature that is indestructible.

Dreams, then, operate as vast mass communicative networks, far more effective at certain levels of the psyche than, for example, television is at a physical level.

The dream state can be used then as a psychological or psychic platform to view other realities, and to glimpse the inner mechanics by which nonphysical events become actualized in your world.

Session 788

Nature of the Psyche, Session 788

Basically, events have nothing to do at all with what you think of as cause and effect.  This is perhaps apparent to some degree when you study dream events, for there the kind of continuity you are used to, connecting events, largely vanishes.

Instead events are built up, so to speak, from significances.  But let us forget that term for a moment and consider association, with which you are already familiar, since your stream of consciousness operates in that fashion.  By its very nature each consciousness is a particular, peculiar, and unique focus of awareness which will experience any possible realities through its own characteristics.

It also “stamps” or “impresses” the universe with its own imprint.  No portion of the universe is inactive or passive, regardless of its seeming organization or its seeming lack of organization.  Each consciousness, then, impresses the universe in its own fashion.  Its very existence sets up a kind of significance, in whose light the rest of the universe will be interpreted.  The universe knows itself through such significances.  Each consciousness is endowed with creativity of a multidimensional nature, so that it will seek to create as many possible realities for itself as it can, using its own significance as a focus to draw into its experience whatever events are possible for it from the universe itself.  It will then attract events from the universe, even as its own existence imprints the universe as an event with the indelible stamp of its own nature.

Put more simply from another viewpoint, each of you as you know yourselves has certain abilities and characteristics of your own.  You experience reality through the cast of those abilities and characteristics, but you also stamp the universe with that particular imprint of individuality that is your own, and you attract those events that are suited to your nature and no other.

Significances fall or happen in certain patterns, and when these become very obvious they appear as cause and effect.  They are simply heavy-handed significances.  Your associative processes and habits are perhaps the closest examples that can give clues of how significances operate.  Even then, however, associations deal with the passage of time, and basically significances do not.  You might think of your Aunt Sarah, for example, and in a few moments the associative process might bring you images of periods in the past when you visited your aunt, of her friends and neighbors, the articles in her house, and episodes connected with your relationship.

At the same time Aunt Sarah, unbeknown to you, might pick up a blue vase, one that you had just seen in your mind as belonging on a shelf in her living room.  Touching the vase, your Aunt Sarah might think of the person who gave it to her, now on the other side of the continent.  That person, perhaps, thinking of buying a present for someone, might settle upon a vase in a flash of inspiration, or suddenly begin humming a song with the name “Sarah” in the title, or possibly even think of your aunt.  If on the other hand any opposing associations existed anywhere along the line, the “chain” of association could be broken.  The last lady might consider a vase, for example, but reject the idea.  Because of the time element, it seems to you that the first episode caused the others, and that your first association concerning your aunt brought about the “following” events.

The inner significances, however, the associations, existed all at once, to be tuned in to at any point of time.  They had their reality basically apart from time, even though they appeared within it.

Actually the three sets of events could easily occur to the three people at once, and if no normal communication happened no one would be the wiser.  The inner tapestry of events deals with just this kind of association.  Emotional intensities and significances compose the nature of events.  In dreams you work with the kind of intensities involved, exploring multitudinous significances.  These are like charged emotional patterns, formed of your own highly personal emotions and intents.

Using such significances as yardsticks, you accept or reject probable events.  You imprint the universe with your own significance, and using that as a focus you draw from it, or attract, those events that fit your unique purposes and needs.  In doing so, to some extent you multiply the creative possibilities of the universe, forming from it a personal reality that would otherwise be absent, in those terms; and in so doing you also add in an immeasurable fashion to the reality of all other consciousness by increasing the bank of reality from which all consciousness draws.

There is no such thing, basically, as random motion.  There is no such thing as chaos.  The universe, by whatever name and in whatever manifestation, attains its reality through ordered sequences of significances.

These are kept separate in various systems of actuality, while still combining in an overall fashion.  You understand the cause-and-effect kind of order, but this is built upon the noncausal aspect of significances.  In a way the dreams that you recall are like numbered paintings, tailored to fit your own intents and purposes, fitting the contours of your mind so perfectly that you forget the larger experiences from which they were drawn.

Physically and psychically the dream itself is the result of the most precise kind of calculation and activity, in which complicated dramas and interactions occur, often highly charged and intense, and yet cut off from the body’s full participation.  These significances, then, involve from your end certain biological cues that regulate the intersection of psychological events with physical activity in time and space.  Only when all conditions match your own highly specific requirements are the necessary cues activated to give you physical experience.  To that extent in dreams you are “on hold”, involved with a range of action too wide to fit the contours of practical earth experience.

These significances set up their own codes, then, so that physical events must be coded in a certain fashion, and dreams in another.  There is, then, what can be called a predream state, or a state of experience from which the dream will be formed.  Such experience will carry a different kind of code, further divorcing it from that acceptable intersection with bodily activity, space, and time.

Your physical events happen to you as you.  In dreams you may experience an event seemingly as someone else, or you may find yourself in the past or future instead of the present.  In waking life, you have the family that you recognize, or group of friends, or profession or what have you.  In dreams you may find yourself married to someone else, or living an entirely different kind of life.  In a way dreams are like variations of the theme of your life, though in reality your life is the theme you have chosen from those possible versions.

To some extent, however, dream events are like physical ones a good deal of the time.  Your dream perceptions seem physical – you walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions.  There are actually many other conditions of existence, but for now we will speak of a predream state, which is actually composed of several conditions of actuality.  Here the physical aspects of events largely vanish, comparatively speaking the farther away you go from the dream state into inner reality.  It would seem to you that experience becomes broader but less specific, but it changes quality so that, for example, one moment in your terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.

This is simply an analogy because you are steeped in that other reality constantly; but its illuminations and nature are transmitted to the self that you know through the formation of dreams, and in your dreams, “it takes time to dream”.  This larger experience, from which your dreams are finally formed, involves you in a kind of journey.  Using another analogy, it is as if you joyfully leave the normal paraphernalia of usual life behind, and ride aboard your own greater psyche into vaster seas of experience.

You leave behind the physical nature of events and go into those areas in which events are formed.  In ways most difficult to describe, you encounter the universe in a more direct fashion, using inner senses that are far more ranging.  Using your own indestructible validity as “bait”, you go forth to draw from the universe the raw material of experience.  You are yourself, yet at that level you are also a part of that universe from which that self springs, and its power and vitality are your own, to be uniquely focused.  In your terms, you literally look backward and forward in time at your individual self and your civilization, seeing where they merge, and feeling the infinite connections, so that each event you choose as your own will also be chosen as a world event – participated in to whatever extent by others, and adding to the available experience of the species from which others can also draw.

A direct cognition is involved in which each consciousness knows what each other one is doing, its “position”, and the implications of its experience.  The entire fabric and framework of time and reality at each point is ascertained, and the probabilities probed and understood.

All of this sounds very complicated.  Yet in a different way the same processes occur at other levels, as in its way cellular consciousness perceives all of the probabilities concerned with physical survival in its most far-reaching complications.  At this moment the cells within your body know the life conditions of any place on the planet, and compute these, ascertaining the ways in which they require action on the body’s part.  Your cells are aware of the motion of the planets and of all circumstances regarding the body’s equilibrium, stability, and survival.  The body is then formed constantly as the result of these computations.

In larger terms, in the predream states you are aware of all of the activities of your own greater psyche as it participates in – and contributes to – the infinite existence of psychic consciousness as you understand it, and becomes aware of the psychological realities that form the framework of its own stability.

Events do not become physical, then, unless certain requirements are met, and certain codes activated.

Experiences at predream levels occur at their own intensities.  The knowledge is translated into information that is broken down in the dream state into more specific data, highly symbolized, suiting individual requirements and “run through the body” in a kind of ghostly trial fashion.

It is then further processed into individual significances, drives, or intents, which convert it into the required codes that will then determine the nature of actualized waking events.  Data must be of particular kinds of intensity before they register as physical matter, or are experienced as physical events.  Part of this processing occurs in the dream state, and creativity plays a large part in the preliminary process.