Category Archives: Gestalt

Sleepwalkers

We have taught ourselves to respond to certain neural patterns, and to ignore alternate ones that now simply operate as background activity. That background activity, however, supports a million forces: the neural stimuli that we accept as biologically real. Those other background stimuli are now quite difficult for us to identify, but they are always there in the [hinterland] of our waking consciousness, like dream chatter way beneath our usual associations.

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Neurologically, we tune into only a portion of our body’s reality and are ignorant of the great, tiny but tumultuous communications that are ever flying back and forth in the microscopic but vital cellular world.

Electrons in our terms are precognitive, and so is our cellular consciousness. Our body’s relative permanence in time is dependent upon the electron’s magnificent behavior as it deals with probabilities. The cell’s stability, and its reliability in the bodily environment, is dependent upon its innate properties of instant communication and instant decision, for each cell is in communication with all others and is united with all others through fields of consciousness, in which each entity of whatever degree plays a part.

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At one level our cells obey the rules of time, but on other levels they defy it. All of these communications are a part of the human parcel of reality, and they all exist beneath what we think of as normal consciousness. Events are not built up initially from physical particles. They are the result of psychological activity.

“In the beginning” we were only aware of that psychological activity. It had not “as yet” thickened itself into form. The form was there, but it was not manifest. I do not particularly like the analogy, but it is useful: Instead of small particles, we had small units of consciousness gradually building themselves into large ones — but a smaller unit of consciousness, is not “less than” a larger unit, for each unit of consciousness contains within itself the innate heritage of All That Is.

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We think of the conscious mind, as we know it, as the only kind of consciousness with a deliberate intent, awareness of itself as itself, and with a capacity for logic and the appreciation of symbolism. That only seems true because of our particular range of activity, and because we can only pinpoint events within a particular psychological spectrum.

Fields of consciousness in physics is called “energy and momentum,” not consciousness.

 

Proliferations of Consciousness

These imply some pretty fantastic abilities on the part of we humans — for such developments show that even though we live as small creatures within the incredible richness of an overall consciousness, or All That Is, still our actions can result in that great consciousness exploring new areas of itself. Quite awesome creative abilities on our part, and ones that unknowingly we take for granted. We do this all of the time, of course, individually and collectively.

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In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.

In the beginning there was instead, a divine psychological gestalt — and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition of the word “being,” since in it the source from which all beings emerges. That being exists in a psychological dimension, a spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in our terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is characterized by such a brilliant concentration that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are equally held in a multi-loving constant focus.

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Our conceptions of beginnings and endings make an explanation of such a situation most difficult, for in our terms the beginning of the universe is meaningless — that is, in those terms there was no beginning.

The universe is always coming into existence, and each present moment bring its own built-in past along with it. We agree on accepting as fact only a small portion of the large available data that compose any moment individually or globally. We accept only those data that fit in with our ideas of motion in time. As a result, for example, our archeological evidence usually presents a picture quite in keeping with our ideas of history, geological eras, and so forth.

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The conscious mind sees with a spectacular but limited scope. It lacks all peripheral vision. I use the term “conscious mind” as we define it, for we allow it to accept as evidence only those physical data available for the five senses — while the five senses, of course, represent only a relatively flat view of reality, that deals with the most apparent surface.

The physical senses are the extensions of inner senses that are, in one way or another, a part of each physical species regardless of its degree. The inner senses provide all species with an inner method of communication. The cells, then, possess inner senses.

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Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. Our world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and there, elements coalescing from brainless gases — nor was the world, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you, and better models coming every geological season.

The universe formed out of what God is.

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The universe is the natural extension of divine creativity and intent, lovingly formed from the inside out — so there was consciousness before there was matter, and not the other way around.

In certain basic and vital ways, our own consciousness is a portion of that divine gestalt. In the terms of our earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.

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Our consciousness will survive our body’s death, but it will also take on another kind of form — a form that is itself composed of “units of consciousness.” We have a propensity for wanting to think in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the consciousness of animals must somehow degrade our own. The divine gestalt, however, is expressed in such a way that its quality is undiluted. It cannot be watered down, so that in basic terms one portion of existence is somehow up or down the scale from another. It is all Grade A.

We limit the capacity of our conscious mind by refusing to allow it to use a larger scope of attention, so that we have remained closed and ignorant about the different, varied, but rich experiences of other species: They do appear beneath us. We have allowed a certain stubborn literal-mindedness to provide us with definitions that served to categorize rather than illuminate other realities beside our own.

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In the beginning, then, there was a subjective world that became objective. Matter was not yet permanent, in our terms, for consciousness was not yet as stable there. In the beginning, then, there was a dream world, in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality, and gradually became awake within that world.

Mountains rose and tumbled. Oceans filled. Tidal waves thundered. Islands appeared. The seasons themselves were not stable. In our terms the magnetic fields themselves fluctuated — but all of the species were there at the beginning, though in the same fashion, for as the dream world broke through into physical reality there was all of the tumultuous excitement and confusion with which a mass creative event is achieved. There was much greater plasticity, motion, variety, give-and-take, as consciousness experimented with its forms. The species and environment together formed themselves in concert, in glorious combination, so that each fulfilled the requirements of its own existence while adding to the fulfillment of all other portions of physical reality.

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That kind of event simply cannot fit into our concepts of “the beginning of the world,” with consciousness arising out of matter almost as a second thought, or with an exteriorized God initiating a divine but mechanistic natural world.

Nor can this concept fit into our versions of good and evil. God, or All that Is, is in the deepest sense completed, and yet uncompleted. Again, I am aware of the contradiction that seems to be presented to our minds. In a sense, however, a creative product, say, helps complete an artist, while of course the artist can never be completed. All That Is, of God, in a certain fashion, now — and this is qualified — learns as we learn, and makes adjustments according to our knowledge. We must be very careful here, for delusions of divinity come sometimes too easily, but in a basic sense we all carry within ourselves the undeniable mark of All That Is — and an inbuilt capacity — to glimpse in our own terms undeniable evidence of our own greater existence. We are as close to the beginning of our world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or Sumerians. The beginning of the world is just a step outside the moment.

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I have a purpose in this blog — for this discussion — and that purpose is to change our ideas of ourselves, by showing a truer picture of our history both in terms of our immortal consciousness and our physical heritage.

A basic religious awareness has always been with mankind and womankind. Here are a few historical and mythological signposts of the intuitive understanding.
God the Father. There’s no way to assign any reasonably accurate date to when God the Father created all things, as described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. (The Biblical account of Creation makes evolution an impossibility.) Nor can the date of Creation be arrived at by counting the Bible’s lists of generations, as given in the Old Testament, since these may well be incomplete.

Mohammed (A.D. 570?-632), the Prophet of Islam, stressed the uniqueness of the god Allah, whose name was already well known in pre-Islamic Arabia.

Zoroaster (628?-551? B.C.) was a Persian religious teacher and prophet.

Zeus was the supreme god of the ancient Greeks, who worshipped him in connection with almost every facet of daily life. He was the son of Cronus and Rhea, and the husband of his sister Hera. The Romans identified Zeus with their own supreme god, Jupiter, or Jove.

Buddha. This is the title given to Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. He was a religious teacher and philosopher who lived in India, probably from 563 to 483 B.C.

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2. I see correlations between the “flat view of reality” given to us by our physical senses, and the “flat” view of the universe that cosmologists perceive when they look way out into space. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that space can curve, and this has been shown to happen near the sun. Yet when scientists examine our universe of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, they see space as essentially flat, instead of curving in upon itself as it should over those enormous distances. Nor can the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe account for the homogeneity of a flat universe. The inflationary model can explain both the appearance of flatness and homogeneity — but, like all theories, it poses other problems that have yet to be resolved.

 

Desire to create out of joy, not from a sense of responsibility

Many if the ideas in my blogs will be accepted by scientists most dubiously, though some, of course, will grasp what I will be saying. It is of course very difficult for the deepest truths cannot be physically proven. Science is used to asking quite specific questions, and it usually comes up with very specific answers — even if those answers are wrong.

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“Wrong” answers can fit together, however, to present a perfect picture, an excellent construct of its own — and why not? For any answers that do not fit the construct are simply thrown away and never appear. So in a fashion we are dealing with what science has thrown away. The picture we will end up presenting, will certainly not fit that of established science.

However, if objective proof of that nature is considered the priority for facts, then as we know science cannot prove its version of the universe’s origin either. It only sets up an hypothesis, which collects about it all data that agree, and again ignores what does not fit. Moreover, science’s thesis meets with no answering affirmation in the human heart — and in fact arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his or her heart man or woman well knows his/her own worth, and realizes that his/her own consciousness is no accident. The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his/her own mental edifices.

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There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately knowledgeable standard within man’s or woman’s consciousness by which he/she ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his/her time, and even if his/her intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that point of integrity knows. That is the portion of him/her, of course, that is born and grows to maturity even while the lungs or digestive processes do not read learned treatises on the body’s “machinery,” so in my blog we will hope to arouse within the reader, of whatever persuasion, a kind of subjective evidence, a resonance between ideas and being. Many people comment, saying that they feel as if somehow they have always been acquainted with our material — and of course they have, for it represents the inner knowing within each individual. In a fashion, creative play is our human version of far greater characteristics from which our universe itself was formed. There are all kinds of definite, even specific, subjective evidence for the nature of our own reality — evidence that is readily apparent once we really begin to look for it, particularly by comparing the world of our dreams with our daily life.

In other words, subjective play is the basis for all creativity, of course — but far more, it is responsible for the great inner play of subjective and objective reality.

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With all due respect, psychologists, with the best of intentions, are barking up the wrong psychological tree. He/she are very enthusiastic about his or her value tests, and his or her enthusiasm is what is important. The nature of the subjective mind, however, will never open itself to such tests, which represent, more than anything else, a kind of mechanical psychology, as if we could break down human values to a kind of logical alphabet of psychic atoms and molecules. A good try, but representative of psychology’s best attempt to make sense of a poor hypothesis.

We may do what we wish ourselves (about taking the tests), of course, but our main purpose is to drive beyond psychology’s boundaries, and not play pussyfoot among the current psychological lilies of the field.

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Our body’s are responding, so let us remember that creativity is playful, and that it always surfaces when we allow our mind to drop its worries.

Whenever a blog is translated, it is almost impossible, of course, to say the same thing in the same way. My blog will always be expressed through those invisible national characteristics that are so intimately involved with language — and obviously, were that not so, no blog could be understood by someone of a foreign language. There are bound to be distortions, but the distortions themselves are meaningful.

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Now, a number of the world’s leading scientists in the physical disciplines have publicly stated their beliefs that basically consciousness plays the primary role in our world and/or universe. For reasons too complicated to go into here, this attitude prevails even with some mathematicians who seek to penetrate to the core of our reality as they understand it.

However, for every scientist bold enough to think this way, there are scores of others who vehemently disagree. For most scientific materialists only physical matter is real. For them consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon, the passive by-product of the brain’s physiology and chemical events. They believe that physical death is the end of everything, that ultimately all if pointless. They derisively call their rebellious colleagues “animists” — those who believe that all life forms and natural phenomena have a spiritual origin independent of physical matter. (Such heretics are called “Vitalists,” a term related to animism, and one which also has a long history of scientific contempt behind it.)

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What can the materialistic scientists use other than mind — or consciousness, that poor epiphenomenon — to study and dissect matter? (Not to mention that innumerable experiments have proven that “physical matter” isn’t solid or objective at all, but “only” energy!) We have, then, the paradox of mind denying its own reality, let alone its importance. As far as we know, human beings are the only creatures on earth who would seriously engage in such learned futile behavior. It’s also very ironic, I think, that the materialists spend years acquiring their eclipsed education and prestige, both of which they then use to inform us of the ultimate futility of all of our endeavors (including their own, or course). But for the materialists, the mind-brain duality isn’t scientific in the orthodox sense. It isn’t falsifiable; that is, it cannot be stated under what precise conditions the mind-brain duality could be proven false. To which, understandably enough, those scientists who do accept the reality of mind reply that neither can the idea be falsified that only what is “physical” is real.

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I think is most risky at this stage in history for anyone — scientist or not — to dogmatically state that life has no meaning, of is a farce, or that attributes of our reality of which we can only mentally conceive at this time do not really exist. Discoveries in the “future” are quite apt to prove such limited viewpoints wrong. The history of science itself contains many examples of theories and “facts” gone awry. Moreover, why would our species want to depend upon as fragile a conception as epiphenomenalism through which to comprehend our reality? Or better yet, why does it in large part? Truly, our individual and collective ignorance of just our own probable reality is most profound at this time in our linear history (in those terms). I would be surprised is ultimately, as a result of mankind’s or womankind’s restless search for meaning, we didn’t end up returning in a new official way to our ancient concepts of spirit within everything, animate and inanimate. Such an updated animistic/vitalistic view would take into account discoveries ranging from sub-nuclear events to the largest imaginable astronomical processes in our observable universe. Human beings do know their own worth.

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There is no doubt that we need to believe that life has meaning. That belief may well be biological imperative. If we were as science maintains — only creatures formed by elements combining mindlessly in a universe itself created by chance, surrounded everywhere by chaos — then how could we even conceive of the idea of meaning or order?

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Science would say that the idea of meaning itself is simply a reflection of the state of the brain, as is the illusion of our consciousness. But a science that disregards consciousness must necessarily end up creating its own illusion. It ignores the reality of experience, the evidence of being, and in so doing it denies rather than reinforces life’s values.

 

Atoms are “processes” rather than things

The classical conception of the typical atom as being composed of a neat nucleus of indivisible protons and neutrons circled by electrons is largely passe, although for convenience sake we may still describe the atom that way. (In those terms, the one exception is the hydrogen atom, which evidently consist of but one proton and one electron cloud, or “smear.”) For the simple purposes of this blog, then, I’m leaving out considerations involving quantum mechanics, which concept repudiates the idea of “particles” to begin with. (And surely that notion involves more than a little of the psychic, or “irrational.” What a heretical thought from the scientific viewpoint!) But each atom of whatever element is an amazingly complicated, finely balanced assemblage of forces and particles woven together in exquisite detail — one of the more basic examples of the unending and stupendous creativity, order, and design of nature, or consciousness, or All That IS.

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Through their work with particle accelerators, or “atom smashers,” physicists have discovered that protons and neutrons themselves are composed of forces and particles that in turn are almost certainly composed of forces and particles, and so on, in an ever-descending scale of smaller and smaller entities and concepts. Over 100 subatomic particles have been identified so far, and no one doubts now that many more will found. The existence of a number of still-undiscovered specific particles has been predicted.

Our scientists can count elements. That is, they will create more and discover more until they are ready to go out of their minds, because they will always create physical ‘camouflages’ of the real nonphysical thing. And while they create instruments to deal with smaller and smaller particles, they will actually see smaller and smaller particles, seemingly without end.

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As their instruments reach farther into the universe they will ‘see’ farther and farther, but they will automatically transform what they apparently ‘see’ into the camouflage patterns with which they are familiar. They are and they will be the prisoners of their own tools.

Instruments calculated to measure the vibrations with which scientists are familiar will be designed and redesigned. All sorts finally of seemingly impossible phenomena will be discovered with these instruments, until the scientists realize that something is desperately wrong. The instruments will be planned to catch certain camouflages, and since they will be expertly thought out they will perform their function. I do not want to get too involved. However, by certain means the instruments themselves will transform data from terms that we cannot understand into.

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Some of the “particles’ the theoretical physicists have discovered — and/or created — in their gigantic particle accelerators have unbelievably short life-spans in our terms, vanishing, it seems, almost before they’re born. I like to think of such research from the particle’s point of view, though, a consideration I haven’t seen mentioned in the few scientific journals I have read. The merest particle is basically conscious in its own way. Mesons are classes of particles produced from the collisions of protons. Did a meson, for example, choose to participate in an atom-smashing experiment in order to merely peek in on our gross physical reality for much less than the billionth of a second if exists with that identity, before it decays into electrons and photons? From its viewpoint, our reality might be an incomprehensible to it as its reality is to us — yet the two inevitably go together.

In it way the meson may have all of the “time” it needs, or wants. It may look upon our world as one frozen or motionless, upon other subatomic particles as very slow-moving indeed, or even faster than it is. (As far as “time” goes, some particles live for far less than a trillionth of a second.”) I’m quite sure, however, that the meson, or any short-lived particle, searches out its own kind of value fulfillment while here with us. Probable realities, which I haven’t even mentioned, must be deeply involved also.

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And of course there are all sorts of motion, some of them very stable, if still incomprehensible to us. But whereas the meson vanishes from our view after its exceedingly brief existence, the electron has an “infinite” life-span. Think of the unending varieties of value fulfillment it explores in just our world alone! Talk about motion: The average electron orbits its atomic nucleus about a million times each billionth of a second (or nanosecond).

Electromagnetic energy units (or units of consciousness), these nonphysical entities — and many others of a like nature — are emanations of consciousness, or All That Is, and in “size” rank far below the tiniest particles ever observed in atom smasher. Each unit of consciousness contains within itself innately infinitely infinite properties of expansion, development and organization; yet within itself always maintains the kernel of its own individuality. It is aware energy, not personified but awarized.

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The varieties of consciousness — the inner psychological particles, the equivalent, say, of the atom or molecule, or proton, neutron or quark — those nonphysical, ‘charmed,’ ‘strange,’ forms of consciousness that make experience go up or down, and all around and around — are never of course dealt with by science.

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If physical form is made up of such multitudinous, invisible particles, how much more highly organized must be the inner components of consciousness, without whose perceptions matter itself would be meaningless. The alliances of consciousness, then, are far more vast than those of particles in any form.

The Now Beginning

In terms of our equations, energy and consciousness and matter are one. And in those terms (the qualifications are necessary) — consciousness is the agent that directs the transformation of energy into form and if form into energy. All possible visible or invisible particles that we discover or imagine — meaning hypothesized particles — possess consciousness. They are energized consciousness.

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There are certain characteristics inherent in energy itself, quite aside from any that we ascribe to it, since of course to date we do not consider energy conscious.

Energy is above all things infinitely creative, innovative, original. Energy is imaginative. (Any scientists who might be reading this blog may as well stop here.) I am not assigning human traits to energy. Instead, our human traits are the result of energy’s characteristics — a rather important difference. Space as we think of it is, in our terms, filled with invisible particles. They are the unstated portion of physical reality, the un-manifest medium in which our world exists. In that regard, however, atoms and molecules are stated, though we cannot see them with our [ unaided ] eye. The smaller particles that make them up become “smaller and smaller,” finally disappearing from the examination of any kind of physical instrument, and these help bridge the gap between un-manifest and manifest reality.

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For the terms of this discussion of the beginning of our world, I will deal with known qualities for now — the atoms and molecules. In the beginning they imagined the myriad of forms that were physically possible. They imagined the numberless cells that could arise from their own cooperative creation. Energy is boundless. It is exuberant. It knows no limits. In those terms, the atoms dreamed the cells into physical being — and from that new threshold of physical activity cellular consciousness dreamed of the myriad organizations that could emerge from this indescribable venture.

Again, in actuality all of this took place at once, yet the depth of psychological experience contained therein can never be measured, for it involved a kind of value fulfillment with which each consciousness is involved. That characteristic of value fulfillment is perhaps the most important element in the being of All That Is, and it it a part of the heritage of all species.

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Value fulfillment itself is most difficult to describe, for it combines the nature of a loving presence — a presence with the innate knowledge of its own divine complexity — with a creative ability of infinite proportions that seeks to bring to fulfillment even the slightest, most distant portion of its own inverted complexity. Translated into simpler terms, each portion of energy is endowed with an inbuilt reach of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potentials in all variations — and in such a way that such a development also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.

In those terms, then, there was in the beginning an almost unimaginable time in which energized consciousness, using its own creative abilities, its own imagination, experimented with triumphant rambunctiousness, trying out one form after another. In those terms we are used to thinking of, nothing was stable. Consciousness as we think of it turned into matter, and then into pure energy and back again.

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Subjectivity still largely ruled. Like an adolescent leaving home for the first time, individualized consciousness was also somewhat homesick, and returned often to the family homestead — but gradually gained confidence and left finally to form a universe.

Now because All That IS contains within itself such omnipotent, fertile, divine creative characteristics, all portions of its subjective experience attained dimensions of actuality impossible to describe. The thoughts, for example, of All That Is were not simply thoughts as we might have, but multidimensional mental events of superlative nature. Those events soon found that a transformation must occur, if they were to journey into objectivity — for no objectivity of itself could contain the entire reality of subjective events that existed within divine subjectivity. Only in that context could their relative perfection be maintained. Yet they had yearned before the beginning for other experiences, and even for fulfillment of a different nature. They sensed a kind of value fulfillment that required of them the utilization of their own creative abilities. They yearned to create as they had been created, and All That Is, in a kind of divine perplexity, nevertheless realized that his had always been its own intent.

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All That IS realized that such a separation would also allow us to bring about a different kind of divine art, in which the creators themselves created, and their creations created, bringing into actuality existences that were possible precisely because there would seem to be a difference between the creator and the creations. All That Is is, therefore, within each smallest portion of consciousness.

Yet each smallest portion of consciousness can uniquely create, bring into being, eccentric versions of All That Is, that in certain terms All That Is, without that separation, could not otherwise create. The loving support, the loving encouragement of the slightest probable consciousness and manifestation — that is the intent of All That Is.

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All That Is knows that even this purpose is a portion of a larger purpose. In terms of time, the realization of that purpose will emerge with another momentous explosion of subjective inspiration into objectivity, or into another form. In deeper terms, however, that purpose is also known now, and to one extent or another the entire universe dreams of it, as once cellular consciousness dreamed of the organs that it might “form.”

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I want to stress that I am speaking here not so much about a kind of spiritual evolution as I am about an expansion. We will for now, however, confine ourselves to discussion of consciousness in the beginning of the world, stressing that the first basis of physical life was largely subjective, and that the state of dreaming not only helped shape the consciousness of our species, but also in those terms served to provide a steady source of information to man and woman about his/her physical environment, and served as an inner web of communication among all species.

 

The year 2020, and the idea of time and of dates seems to be indelibly mixed into everyone’s psychology

We can remember last year, and to some extent recall the past years of our lives. It appears to us that our present consciousness wanders backward into the past, until finally we can remember no longer — and on a conscious level, at least, we must take the very event of our birth under secondhand evidence. Few people have conscious memory of it.

For the purpose of our discussion, I must necessarily couch this blog to some degree in the framework of time. I must honor our specifics. Otherwise my blog readers would not understand what I am trying to say.

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Even though this blog is being written within time’s tradition, therefore, I must remind you that basically that tradition is not mine — and more, basically, it is not yours either.

In the deepest of terms, and in ways that quite scandalize the intellect when it tries to operate alone, the beginning is now. That critical explosion of divine subjective into objectivity is always happening, and we are being given life “in each moment” because of the simultaneous nature of that divine subjectivity.

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I hope that in other portions of my blogs certain mental exercises will allow us to leap over the tradition of time’s framework and sense with the united intellect and intuitions our own individual part in a spacious present that is large enough to contain all of time’s segments.

Assuming that the big-bang origin of the universe was a hot event

Theoretical physicists have charted how the first explosion may have ” evolved” from one with temperature well in excess of 100,00 million degrees Kelvin into a cooler one of “only” a few thousand degrees Kelvin around 500,000 years later, so that atoms could begin to form.

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One less prominent theory The “inflationary model,” which may become much better known. It incorporates many of the features of the big-bang theory, and actually may answer certain questions in a better scientific fashion. One of the big differences between the two is that in the big-bang theory all of matter in the universe was already present, though existing in an extremely dense state which then began to expand; the inflationary model suggests that the universe was created out of nothing, or out of just about nothing — meaning that through unforeseeable rhythms sub-atomic particles spontaneously came into being as matter. A fantastic, inflationary expansion then began. Yet this creation of matter out of nothing, so to speak, violates at least some of the laws of conservation — laws that are indeed among the most basic and chemical tenets of physics.

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I don’t necessarily believe in either the big-bang or inflationary models of the creation of the universe, even though material in my blogs may be evocative of portions of both theories. In physics, we’re asked to believe that this “extremely dense state” which began to expand was in actuality many billions of times smaller than a proton. (Protons are subatomic components of the nuclei of atoms.) Matter is a form of energy. Even so, I have trouble conceptualizing the idea that all matter in our universe, out to the farthest-away galaxy of billions of stars, grew from this unimaginably small and dense, unimaginably hot “original” state or area of being. I can see how such a concept can be postulated mathematically — but could it ever have really happened in ordinary terms?

Imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness

A body not diseased or defective, but without the overriding ego-directed consciousness that we have. The sleepwalker’s physical abilities surpassed ours. They were as agile as animals, their purpose simply to be. Their main points of consciousness were elsewhere, their primary focuses scarcely aware of the bodies they had created. Yet they learned ‘through experience,’ and began to ‘awaken,’ to become aware of themselves, to discover time, or to create it.

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The sleepwalkers were not asleep to themselves, only from our viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli. This is the other side of our own experience. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. In what we would call the physical waking state, these individuals slept, yet they behaved with great natural physical grace. They did not saddle the body with negative beliefs of disease or limitation. They did not age to the extent that we do.

The universe began tomorrow

The universe will begin yesterday. The universe began tomorrow. Both of these statements are quite meaningless. The tenses are wrong, and perhaps our time sense is completely outraged. Yet the statement: “The universe began in some distant past, ” is, in basic terms, just as meaningless.

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In fact, the first two statements, while making no logical sense, do indeed hint of phenomena that show time itself to be no more than a creative construct. Time and space are in a fashion part of the furniture of our universe.

The very experience of passing moments belongs to our psychological rooms in the same way that clocks are attached to our walls. Whenever science or religion seeks the origin of the universe, they search for it in the past. The universe is being created now. Creation occurs in each moment, in our terms. The illusion of time is being created now. It is therefore somewhat futile to look for the origins of the universe by using a time scheme that is in itself, at the very least, highly relative.

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Our now, or present moment, is a psychological platform. It seems that the universe began with an initial burst of energy of some kind. Evolutionists cannot account for its cause. Many religious people believe that a god exists in a larger dimension of reality, and that he or she created the universe while being himself or herself outside of it. He or she set it into motion. Many individuals, following either persuasion, believe that regardless of its source, the universe must run out of energy. Established science is quite certain that no energy can now be created or destroyed, but only transformed (as stated in the first laws of thermodynamics). Science sees energy and matter as being basically the same thing, appearing differently under varying circumstances.

In certain terms, science and religion are both dealing with the idea of an objectively created universe. Either God “made it,” or physical matter, in some unexplained manner, was formed after an initial explosion of energy, and consciousness emerged from that initially dead matter in a way yet to be explained.

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Instead, consciousness formed matter. Each atom and molecule has its own consciousness. Consciousness and matter and energy are one, but consciousness initiates the transformation of energy into matter. In those terms, the “beginning” of our universe was a triumph in the expansion of consciousness, as it learned to translate itself into physical form. The universe emerged into actuality in the same way, but to a different degree, that any idea emerges from what we think of as subjectivity into physical expression.

The consciousness of each reader of this blog existed before the universe was formed: — but that consciousness was un-manifest. Our closest approximation — and its is an approximation only — of the state of being that existed before the universe was formed is the dream state. In that state before the beginning, our consciousness existed free of space and time, aware of immense probabilities. This is extremely difficult to verbalize, yet it is very important that such an attempt be made. Our consciousness is a part of an infinitely original creative process.

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I will purposely avoid the word “God” because of the connotations placed upon it by conventional religion. I will make an attempt to explain the characteristics of this divine process throughout this blog. I call the process “All That Is.” All That Is is so much a part of its creations,” for each creation also carries indelibly within it the characteristics of its source.

If we have thought that the universe followed a mechanistic model, then we would have to say that each portion of this “cosmic machine” created itself, knowing its position in the entire “future construction.” We would have to say further that each portion came gladly out of its own source individually, neatly tailored to its position, while at the same time that individual source was also as intimately the source of each other individual portion.

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I am not saying that the universe is the result of some “psychological machine,” either, but that each portion of consciousness is a part of All That Is, and that the universe falls together in a spontaneous, divine order — and that each portion of consciousness carries within it indelibly the knowledge of the whole.

The birth of the world represented a divine psychological awakening. Each consciousness that take a part in the physical universe dreamed of such a physical existence, in our terms before the earth was formed. In greater terms than ours, it is quite true to say that the universe is not formed yet, or that the universe has vanished. In still vaster terms, however, the fact is that in one state or another of the universe has always existed.

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Our closest approximation of the purpose of the universe can be found in those loving emotions that we have toward the development of our children, in our intent to have them develop their fullest capacities.

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Our finest aspirations can give us some dim clue as to the great creative thrust that is behind our own smallest act, for our own smallest act is possible only because our body has already been provided for in the physical world. Our life is given. In each moment it is renewed. So smoothly and effortlessly do we ride that thrust of life’s energy that we are sometimes scarcely aware of it. We are not equipped with a certain amount of energy that then wears out and dies. Instead we are, again, newly created in each moment.

The blueprints for “ideal” development exist within the pool of genetic knowledge

The ideal blueprints provide the species with multitudinous avenues for fulfillment. Those blueprints exist mentally as ideals. They express themselves through the impetus and creativity of the species’ individual members.

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Our natural athletes, for example, show through their physical expertise certain ideal body conditions. They may personify great agility or strength or power: individual attributes, physical ideals which are held up to others for their appreciation, and which signify, to whatever extent, abilities inherent in the species itself.

I believe that man and woman runs the mile much quicker now than he or she did, say, thirty years ago. Has the body’s effective speed suddenly quickened? Hardly. Instead, mental beliefs about the body’s performance have changed, and increased physical speed resulted. The body can indeed run faster than the current record (of 3:39). I merely want to show effect of beliefs upon physical performance. All people do not want to be expert runners, however. Their creativity and their ideals may lie in quite different fields of endeavor, but individual performance always adds to the knowledge of the species. Good, better, best. Is it bad to be a poor runner? Of course not, unless running is your own particular avocation. And if it is , you improve with practice.

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Now our ideals, whatever they may be, initially emerge from our inner experience, and this applies to the species as a whole. Our ideas of society and cooperation arise from both a biological and spiritual knowledge given us at birth. Man and woman recognized the importance of groups after observing the animals’ cooperation. Our civilizations are our splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give us physical life. This does not mean that the intellect is any less, but that it uses its abilities to help us form physical civilizations that are the reflections of mental, spiritual, and biological inner civilizations. We learn from nature always, and we are a part of it always.

Our searches toward understanding excellent performance in any area — our idealisms — are all spiritually and biologically ingrained. If many of the conditions we have mentioned are less than ideal in our society, then we can as an individual begin to change those situations. We do this by accepting the rightness of our own personhood. We do this by discarding ideas of unworthiness and powerlessness, no matter what their sources. We do this by beginning to observe our own impulses, by trusting our own direction. We start wherever we are, today.

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We do not dwell upon the unfortunate conditions in our environment, but do take steps in our own life to express our ideals in whatever way is given. Those ways are multitudinous.

Generally speaking, for example, If you are seriously worried about a physical condition, go to a doctor, because your own beliefs may over frighten you otherwise. Begin with innocuous but annoying physical conditions, however, and try to work those out for yourself. Try to discover why you are bothered. When you have a headache or a simple stomach upset, or if you have a chronic, annoying but not serious condition, such as trouble with you sinuses, of if you have hay fever — in those situations, remind yourself that your body does indeed have the capacities to heal itself.

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Do these exercises to discover what conditions of a mental nature, or psychological origin, are causing distress. instead of taking an aspirin for a headache, sit down, breathe quietly, and remind yourself that you are an integral part of the universe. Allow yourself to feel a sense of belonging with nature. Such an exercise can often relieve a headache in no time. But each such experience will allow us to build up a sense of trust in our own body’s processes.

Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses. Tell yourself to ignore literature or programs that speak authoritatively about the species’ “killer instincts.” Make an effort to free your intellect of such hampering beliefs. Take a chance on your own abilities. If we learn to trust our basic integrity as a person, then we will be able to assess our abilities clearly, neither exaggerating them or under assessing them.

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We will not feel the need, say, to “justify our existence” by exaggerating a particular gift, setting up the performance of one particular feat or art as a rigid ideal, when in fact we may be pleasantly gifted but not greatly enough endowed with a certain ability to give us the outstanding praise we think we might deserve.

On the other hand, there are many highly gifted people who continually put down their abilities, and are afraid to take one small step toward their expression. If we accept the rightness of our life in the universe, then our ideals will be those in keeping with our nature. They will be fairly easily given expression, so that they add to our own fulfillment and to the development of the society as well.

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Our impulses are our closest communication with our inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of oneself that we have in dreams. We were born because we had the impulse to be. The universe exists because it had the impulse to be. There was no exterior cosmic Pied Piper, singing magical notes or playing a magical tune, urging the universe into being. The urge to be came from within, and that urge is repeated to some extent in each impulse, each urge toward action on the part of man and woman or molecule. If we do not trust the nature of our impulses, then we do not trust the nature of our life, the nature of the universe, or the nature of our own being.

Any animal knows better than to distrust the nature of its own life, and so does any infant. Nature exists by virtue of faith. The squirrels gather nuts in the faith that they will have provisions, in the faith that the next season will come, and that spring will follow winter. Our impulses are immersed in the quality called faith, for they urge us into action in the faith that the moment for action exists. Our beliefs must interact with our impulses, however, and often they can erode that great natural beneficial spontaneity that impulses can provide.

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When I speak of impulses, many of you will automatically think of impulses that appear contradictory or dangerous or “evil” — and that is because we are so convinced of the basic unworthiness of our being. We have every right to question our impulses, to choose among them, to assess them, but we must be aware of them, acknowledge their existence, for they will lead us to our own true nature. this may involve a lengthy journey for some of us, with our belief systems for many of our impulses now are the result of the pressure caused by perfectly normal unacknowledged ones in the past. But our impulses reflect the basic impulse of our life. Even if they appear contradictory at any given time, overall they will be seen to form constructive patterns toward action that point more clearly towards our own clear path for fulfillment and development.

Natural attributes show themselves quite clearly in early childhood, for example, when we are allowed greater freedom to do what we want to do. As children, some people love to work with words, some with images, some with objects. Some show great ability in dealing with their contemporaries, while others naturally lean toward solitude and private meditations. Look back toward the impulsive behavior of your childhood, toward those activities that mostly pleased you.

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If you painted pictures, this does not mean that you necessarily should be an artist. Only we the strength of those impulses — but if they are intense and consistent, then pursue them. If you end up simply painting as a hobby, that will still enrich your life and understanding. If your impulses lead you toward relationships with others, then do not let fears of unworthiness stand in your way. It is very important that we express our idealism actively, to whatever extent we can, for this increases our sense of worth and power.

Such action serves as a safeguard so that we do not overemphasize the gaps that may exist in oneself or in society, between the reality and the ideal condition. Many people want to change the world for the better, but that ideal seems so awe-inspiring that they think they can male no headway unless they perform some great acts of daring or heroism, or envision themselves in some political or religious place of power, or promote an uprising or rebellion. The ideal seems so remote and unreachable that, again, sometimes any means, however, reprehensible, eventually can seem justified. To change the world for the better, we must begin by changing our own life. There is no other way.

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We begin by accepting our own worth as a part of the universe, and by granting every other being that same recognition. We begin by honoring life in all of its forms. We begin by changing our thoughts toward life in all of its forms. We begin by changing our thoughts toward our contemporaries, our country, our family, our working companions. If the ideal of loving our neighbor like oneself seems remote, we will at least absolutely refrain from killing our neighbor — and our neighbor is any person on the face of the planet.

We cannot love our neighbor, in fact, until we love oneself, and if we believe that it is wrong to love oneself, then we are indeed unable to love anyone else.

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For a start we will acknowledge our existence in the framework of nature, and to do that we must recognize the vast cooperative processes that connect each species with each other one. If we truly use our prerogatives as an individual in our country, then we can exert far more power in normal daily living than we do now. Every time we affirm the rightness of our own existence, we help others. Our mental states are part of the planet’s psychic’s atmosphere.

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A note: Our exterior civilizations do indeed mirror and reflect the great cellular civilizations, so that we try to exteriorize that kind of order and creativity.

Many of our technological advances — all of them, for that matter — are rather interpretations of the inner mechanisms of nature: sonar, radar, and so forth, as we attempt to physically or objectively reproduce the inner realities of nature. It is sometimes almost impossible to verbally describe civilizations of scent, civilizations built upon temperature variations, alphabets of color, pressure gradations — all of these highly intimate and organized, but quite outside of verbal representation.

In our lives, anything we want is possible within the contours of our natures, if only we understand that this is so.

 

Physically death gives life

All biological organisms know that physical life depends upon a constant transformation of consciousness and form. This biological knowledge is intimately acknowledged at microscopic levels. Even our cells know that their deaths are necessary for the continuation of our physical form.

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The entire orientation is strange or alien only to our conscious belief systems. in one way or another, most people are aware of a desire for death before they die — a desire they usually do not consciously acknowledge. To a large measure, the sensations of pain are also the results of our beliefs, so that even diseases that are indeed accompanied, now, by great pain, need not be. Obviously, I am saying that “deadly” viruses do not “think of themselves” as killers, and more than a cat does when it devours a mouse. The mouse may die, and a cell might die as a result of the virus, but the connotations applied to such events are also the result of beliefs. In the greater sphere of spiritual and biological activity, the viruses are protecting life at their level, and in the capacity given them.

In one way or another, they are always invited in response to that greater rhythm of existence in which physical life is dependent upon constant transformation of consciousness and form.

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The phase of death is, then, a part of life’s cycle. I have mentioned evolutionary experiments, as we think of evolution. There is a disease that I have read about recently, where the skin turns leathery after intense itching — a fascinating development in which the human body tries to form a leathery-like skin that would, if the experiment continued, be flexible enough for, say, seat pose and normal locomotion, yet tough enough to protect itself in jungle environments from the bites of many “still more dangerous” insects and snakes. Many such experiments appear in certain stages as diseases, since the conditions are obviously not normal physical ones. To some extent, cancer also represents a kind of evolutionary experiment. But all such instances escape us because we think of so-called evolution as finished.

Some varieties of our own species were considered by the animals as diseased animal species, so I want to broaden our concepts there. In the entire natural scheme, and at all levels — even social or economic ones — disease always has its own creative basis. Abnormalities of any kind in birth always represent probable versions itself — and they are kept in the gene pool to provide a never-ending bank of alternates.

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There are all kinds of interrelationships. So-called Mongoloid children, for example, are reminders of man’s and woman’s purely emotional heritage, as separate from his or her intellectual achievements. They often appear more numerously in industrialized civilizations for that reason

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The disease I referred to is Onchocerciasis, which is caused by a filarial parasite spread by the bite of the blackfly. Beside producing the gruesome leathery skin, Onchocerciasis can cause blindness — hence its common name, river blindness. This most serious affliction appears to be centered in West Africa, and infects many millions of people there. Four centuries ago, it was carried to the Western Hemisphere by slaves, and is now found in certain areas of Mexico, south to Brazil.

Onchocerciasis doesn’t kill, and the percentage of victims who lose their sight varies according to location. Perhaps in this biological experiment, the blindness represents an evolutionary dead end, in those terms.