Category Archives: Lessons

Probing the brain of an idiot or genius will find only the physical matter of the brain itself.

Not one idea will be discovered residing in the brain cells. We can try to convey an idea, we can feel its effects, but we cannot see it as we can the chair. Only a fool would say that ideas were non-existent, however, or deny their importance.

We cannot find any given dream location, either, within the brain itself. The solid matter of our world is the result of the play of our senses upon an inner dimension of activity that exists as legitimately, and yet as tantalizing hidden, as an idea or a dream location.

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It is easy for us to see that seeds bring forth the fruit of the earth, each [of] their own kind. No seed is identical to any other, yet generally speaking there are species that serve to unite them. We do not mistake an orange for a grape. In the same way ideas or thoughts form general patterns, bringing forth in our world certain kinds of events. In this respect our thoughts and feelings “seed” physical reality, bringing forth materializations.

We operate quite nicely politically, living in villages, townships, countries, states, and so forth, each with certain customs and local ordinances. These in no way affect the land itself. They are designations for practical purposes, and they imply organization of intent or affiliation at one level. They are political patterns, invisible but highly effective. There are, however, far more vigorous invisible mental patterns, into which the thoughts and feelings of humankind are organized — or, naturally, organize themselves.

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Each person’s thoughts flow into formation, forming part of the earth’s psychic atmosphere. From that atmosphere flows the natural earthly patterns from which our seasons emerge with all of their variety and effects. We are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that we are, for we have our hand in forming them. We are creatively involved in the earth’s cycles. No one can be born for oneself, or die for oneself, and yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in which the entire planet participates. In personal terms, again, each species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life and experience.

In those terms, natural disasters ultimately end up righting a condition that earlier blighted the desired quality of life, so that adjustments were made.

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The “victims” choose to participate in those conditions at spiritual, psychological, and biological levels. Many of those who are counted among the fatalities might otherwise die of extended illnesses, for example. At cellular levels such knowledge is available, and in one way or another imparted, often in dreams, to the individual. Consciousness comprehension need not follow, for many people know such things, and pretend not to know them at the same time.

Others have finished with their challenges; they want to die and are looking for an excuse — a face-saving device. However, those who choose such deaths want to die in terms of drama, in the middle of their activities, and are in a strange way filled with the exultant inner knowledge of life’s strength even at the point of death. At the last they identify with the power of nature that seemingly destroyed them.

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That identification often brings about in death — but not always — an added acceleration of consciousness, and involves such individuals in a kind of “group death experience,” where all of the victims more or less embark into another level of reality “at the same time.”

Those people were aware just beneath consciousness of the possibilities of such an event long before the disaster occurred, and could until the last moment choose to avoid the encounter. Animals know of weather conditions ahead of time, as old tales say. This perception is a biological part of our heritage also. The body is prepared, though consciously it seems we are ignorant.

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There are innumerable relationships that exist between the interior environment of the body and the weather patterns. The ancient feelings of identification with storms are quite valid, and in that respect the “realism” of feelings is far superior to the realism of logic. When a person feels a part of a storm, those feelings speak a literal truth. Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause-and-effect relationships. Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in our terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that our cause-and-effect level is far too slow to perceive.

In that regard also, the activities of the inner environment are too fast for us to follow intellectually. Our intuitions, however, can give us clues to such behavior. A country is responsible for its own droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes — and for its own harvests and rich display of products, its industry and cultural achievements, and each of these elements is related to each other one.

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If the quality of life that is considered spiritually and biologically necessary fails, then adjustments occur. A political problem might be altered by a natural disaster if political means fail. On the other hand, the rousing creative energies of the people will emerge.

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Excellence will show itself through the arts, cultural creatively, technological or sociological accomplishments. The species tries to fulfill its great capacities. Each physical body in its own way is like the world. It has its own defenses and abilities, and each portion of it strives for a quality of existence that will bring to the smallest parts of it the spiritual and biological fulfillment of its own nature.

The self out grows the flesh.

We live in a community of thoughts and feelings also.

We live in a physical community, but we live first in a community of thoughts and feelings. There trigger our physical actions. They directly affect the behavior of our body. The experience of the animals is different, yet in their own ways animals have both individual intent and purpose. Their feelings are certainly as pertinent as ours. They dream, and in their way they reason.

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They do not “worry.” They do not anticipate disaster when no signs of it are apparent in their immediate environment. On their own they do not need preventative medicine. Pet animals are inoculated against diseases, however. In our society this almost becomes a necessity. In a “purely natural” setting we would not have as many living puppies or kittens. There are stages of physical existence, and in those terms nature knows what it is doing. When a species over-produces, the incidences of, say, epidemics grow. This applies to human populations as well as to the animals.

The quality of life is important above all. Newborn animals either die quickly and naturally, painlessly, before their consciousnesses are fully focused here, or are killed by their mothers — not because they are weak or unfit to survive, but because the [physical] conditions are not those that will produce the quality of life that makes survival “worthwhile.”

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The consciousness that became so briefly physical is not annihilated, however, but in our terms waits for better conditions.

There are also “trail runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.

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Suffering is not necessarily good for the soul at all, and left alone natural creatures do not seek it. There is a natural compassion, a biological knowledge, so that the mother of an animal knows whether or not existing conditions will support the new offspring. Animals instinctively realize their relationship with the great forces of life. They will instinctively starve an offspring while its consciousness is still unfocused, rather than send it loose under adverse conditions

In a natural state, many children would die stillborn for the same reasons, or would be naturally aborted. There is a give-and-take between all elements of nature, so that such individuals often choose mothers, for example, who perhaps wanted the experience of pregnancy but not of birth — where they choose the experience of the fetus but not necessarily [that] of the child. Often in such cases these are “fragmented personalities,” wanting to taste physical reality, but not being ready to deal with it. Each case is individual, however, so these are general statements.

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Many children, who, it seems, should have died of disease, of “children epidemics,” nevertheless survive because of their different intents. The world of thought and feeling may be invisible, and yet it activates all physical systems with which we are acquainted.

Animals as well as men can indeed make social statements, that appear in a biological context. Animals as well as men can indeed make social statements, that appear in a biological context. Animals stricken by kitten and puppy diseases, for example, choose to die, pointing out the fact that the quality of their lives individually and en masses is vastly lacking. Their relationships with their own species is no longer in balance. They cannot use their full abilities or powers, nor are many of them given compensating elements in terms of a beneficial psychic relationship with man and woman — but instead are shunted aside, unwanted and unloved. An unloved animal does not want to live.

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Love involves self-respect. The trust in individual biological zest and integrity. To that extent, in their way animal epidemics have the same causes as human ones.

Animals can indeed commit suicide. So can a race or a species. The dignity of a spirited life demands that a certain quality of experience be maintained.

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The infamous “Black Death,” were (and still are) spread to man by fleas carrying a bacterium from infected rats. Other forms of affliction are carried by other rodents. The complicated interactions and communications involving all forms of life, man’s and woman’s deep dissatisfactions would have periodically helped trigger the resurgence of scourges like the plagues: In 3rd-century Rome, for instance, several thousand people were said to have died each day; estimates are that over a 20-year period in the 14th century three-quarters of the population of Europe and Asia perished; there was the great plague of London in 1665, and so forth.

Many can thankfully praise a given doctor for discovering a disease condition ‘in time.’ so that effective countering measures were taken and the disease was eliminated. We cannot know for sure, of course, what would have happened otherwise. To those people who wanted to die. If they did not die of the disease, they may have ‘fallen prey’ to an accident, or died in a war, or in a natural disaster.

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They may have been ‘cured’ whether or not they had treatment, and gone on to lead productive lives. We do not know. A man or woman who is ready to die, if saved from one disease will promptly get another, or find a way of fulfilling that desire. Our problem there rests with the will to live, and with the mechanisms of the psyche.

The English naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), maintained in his theory of organic evolution that all plants and animals develop from their own previous forms by inheriting minute variations through succeeding generations, with those forms best fitted to the environment being the ones most likely to survive.

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Amazingly, another English naturalist, Alfred Wallace (1823-1882), independently developed a similar theory, and the two men had their work presented to science in the same paper in 1858. The next year Darwin published his The Origin of Species.

Epidemics are the result of mass suicide phenomenon on the parts of those involved.

Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individual deaths amount to a mass statement.

On one level the deaths are a protest against the time in which they occur. Those involved have private reasons, however. The reasons, of course, vary from one individual to another, yet all involved “want their death to serve a purpose” beyond private concerns. Partially, then such deaths are meant to make the survivors question the conditions — for unconsciously the species well known there are reasons for such mass deaths that go beyond accepted beliefs.

In some historical periods the plight of the poor was so horrible, so unendurable, that outbreaks of the plague occurred, literally resulting in a complete destruction of large areas of the environment in which such social, political, and economic conditions existed. {Those} plagues took rich and poor alike, however, so the complacent well-to-do could see quite clearly, for example, that to some extent sanitary conditions, privacy, peace of mind, had to be granted to the poor alike, for the results of their dissatisfaction would have quite practical results. Those were deaths of protest.

Individually, each “victim” was to one extent or another a “victim” of apathy, despair, or hopelessness, which automatically lowered bodily defenses.

Not only do such states of mind lower the defenses, however, but they activate and change the body’s chemistries, alter its balances, and initiate disease conditions. Many viruses inherently capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.

If [certain viruses] are triggered, however, to higher activity or overproduction by mental states, they then become “deadly.” Physically they may be passed on in whatever manner is peculiar to a specific strain. Literally, individual mental problems of sufficient severity emerge as social, mass diseases.

The environment in which an outbreak occurs points at the political, sociological, and economic conditions that have evolved, causing such disorder. Often such outbreaks take place after ineffective political or social action — that is, after some unified mass social protest has failed, or is considered hopeless. They often occur also in wartime on the part of a populace [that] is against a given war in which [its] country is involved.

Initially there is a psychic contagion: Despair moves faster than a mosquito, or any outward carrier of a given disease. The mental state brings about the activation of a virus that is, in those terms, passive.

Despair may seem passive only because it feels that exterior action is hopelessness – but its fires rage inwardly, and that kind of contagion can leap from bed to bed and from heart to heart. It touches those, however, who are in the same state only, and to some extent it brings about an acceleration in which something can indeed be done in terms of group action.

Now if we believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in our terms they clearly are not pretty. Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shale, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. Sometimes such Epidemics are eventually responsible for the overthrow of governments, the loss of wars.

There are also even deeper biological connections with the heart of nature. We also are biological creatures. Our proud human consciousness rests on the vast “unconscious” integrity of our physical being. In that regard our consciousness is as natural as our toe. In terms of the species’ integrity our mental states are, then, highly important. Despair or apathy is a biological “enemy.” Social conditions, political state’s, economic polices, and even religious or philosophical frameworks that foster such mental states, bring about a biological retaliation. They act like fire applied to a plant.

The epidemic then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.

Even in the days of the great plagues in England there were those smitten who did not die, and there were those untouched by the disease who dealt with the sick and dying. Those survivors, who were actively involved, saw themselves in a completely different light than those who succumbed, however: They were those, untouched by despair, who saw themselves as effective rather than ineffective. Often they roused themselves from lives of previously unheroic situations, and then performed with great bravely. The horror of the conditions over-whelmed them where earlier they were not involved. The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new, [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in our terms the dead did not die in vain. Epidemics by their public nature speak of public problems — problems that sociologically threaten to sweep the individual to psychic disaster as the physical materialization does biologically.

These are the reasons also for the range or the limits of various epidemics — why they sweep through one area and leave another clear. Why one in the family will die and another survive — for in this mass venture, the individual still forms his or her private reality.

In our society scientific medical beliefs operate, and a kind of preventative medicine, in which procedures [of inoculation] are taken, bringing about in healthy individuals a minute disease condition that the gives disease this procedure might work quite well for those who believe in it. It is, however, the belief, and not the procedure, that works.

I am not recommending that we abandon the procedure when it obviously works for so many — yet you should understand why it bringing about the desired results.

Such medical technology is highly specific, however. We cannot be inoculated with the desire to live, or with the zest, delight, or contentment of the healthy animal. If we have decided to die, protected from one disease in such a manner, we will promptly come down with another, or have an accident. The immunization, while specifically effective, may only reinforce prior beliefs about the body’s ineffectiveness. It may appear that left alone the body would surely develop whatever disease might be “fashionable” at the time, so that the specific victory night result in the ultimate defeat as far as our beliefs are concerned.

We have our own medical systems, however. I do not mean to undermine them, since they are undermining themselves. Some of my statements clearly cannot be proven, in our terms, and appear almost sacrilegious. Yet throughout our history no man or woman has died who did not want to die, regardless of the state of medical technology. Specific diseases have certain symbolic meanings, varying with the times and the places.

There has been great discussion in past years about the survival of the fittest, in Darwinian terms, but little emphasis is placed upon the quality of life, or of survival of the fittest , or of survival itself; or in human terms, [there has been] little probing into question of what makes life worthwhile. Quite simply, if life is not worthwhile, no species will have a reason to continue.

Civilizations are literally social species. They die when those see no reason to live, yet they seed other civilizations. Our private mental states en masse bring about the mass cultural stance of our civilization. To some extent, then, the survival of our civilization is quite literally dependent upon the condition of each individual; and that condition is initially a spiritual, psychic state that gives birth to the physical organism. That organism is intimately connected to the natural biological state of each other person, and to each other living thing, or entity, however minute.

Despite all “realistic” pragmatic tales to the contrary, the natural state of life itself is one of joy, acquiescence with itself — a state in which action is effective, and the power to act is a natural right. We would see this quite clearly with plants, animals, and all other life if we were not so blinded by beliefs to the contrary. We would feel it in the activity of our bodies, in which the vital individual affirmation of our physical being. That activity naturally promotes health and vitality.

I am not speaking of some romanticized, “passive,” flogger, spiritual world, but of a clear reality without impediments, in which the opposite of despair and apathy resigns.

Dying is a biological necessity

Not only for the individual, but to insure the continued vitality of the species. Dying is spiritual and psychological necessity, for after a while the exuberant, ever-renewed energies of the spirit can no longer be translated into flesh.

Inherently, each individual knows that he or she must die physically in order to survive spiritually and psychically. As humans, this may not be an easy thought to have, but it is one that we all acknowledge. That is why we take out life insurance to cover ourselves, as we are aware that one day we will indeed die. The self outgrows the flesh. Particularly since the advent of Charles Darwin’s theories, the acceptance of the fact of death has come to imply a certain kind of weakness, for is it not said that only the strong survive?

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To some degree, epidemics and recognized illnesses serve the sociological purpose of providing an acceptable reason for death — a face-saving device for those who have already decided to die. This does not mean that such individuals make a conscious decision to die, in our terms: But such decisions are often semi-conscious. It might be that those Individuals feel they have fulfilled their purposes — but such decisions may also be built upon a different kind of desire for survival than those understood in Darwinian terms.

It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body’s biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born. He or she dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness or natural disaster — or stray bullet from a murderer’s gun — will kill a person who does not want to die.

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The desire for life has been most flaunted, yet human psychology has seldom dealt with the quite active desire for death. In its natural form this is not a morbid, frightened, neurotic, or cowardly attempt to escape life, but a definite, positive, “healthy” acceleration of the desire for survival, in which the individual strongly wants to leave physical life as once the child wanted to leave the parent’s home.

I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means — often of a violent nature. Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.

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Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth. The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self. In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.

I do not mean to imply guilt on the part of a person who takes his or her own life. In many cases, a more natural death would have ensued in any event as the result of “diseases.” Often for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood. This purpose would be entwined with the parents intent. Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.

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Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to re-experience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed. Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier. Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.

An automobile accident, suicide, or another kind of accident might result in death. The person might fall prey to an epidemic, but the smoothness of biological motion or psychological motion has been lost. I am not here condoning suicide, for too often in our society it is the unfortunate result of conflicting beliefs — and yet it is true to say that all deaths are suicide, and all births deliberate on the part of child and parent. To that extent, we cannot separate issues like a population explosion on the part of certain portions of the world, from epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters.

However, deaths and injuries like say, an automobile accident as mentioned above, might happen to someone due to reasons like negligence of the automobile driver, or other unforeseen events. In such cases, the injured could decide to seek justice and use the Keating Law Firm or their likes in filing for compensation for the injury and trauma that they might have endured. It is always a trying time for a family to witness their loved ones in pain, and to seek any kind of remedy that they feel could somehow alleviate the same, is an option they can explore.

But that said, while we agree that death is a natural process that will come knocking on our door once our time on earth ends, it does not mean that the ones we leave behind in this world should be in pain. Opting for life insurance could be a way to ease their burden, at least financially. Be it for seniors, or the young ones, choosing insurance could be a plausible option to consider. One of the best things a person can do is secure life insurance so their next of kin is prepared for any type of unforeseen circumstance like an accident or health issue that may arise. Burying or cremating costs (in case of a death) could also be covered by Final Expense insurance, which is another possible option.

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In wars, people automatically reproduce their kind to make up for those are killed, and when the race overproduces there will be automatic controls set upon the population. Yet these will in all ways fit the intents and purposes of the individuals involved.

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People will die when they are ready to, following inner dictates and dynamics. A person ready to die will, despite any medication. A person who wants to live will seize upon the tiniest hope, and respond. The dynamics of health have nothing to do with inoculations. They reside in the consciousness of each being.

Thorns or Roses May Grow Within.

The individual will grow outward toward the world, encountering and forming a practical experience, traveling outward from his center in almost vine-like fashion, forming from the fabric of physical reality a conglomeration of pleasant or aesthetic, and unpleasant or prickly events.

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The vine of experience in this analogy is formed in quite a natural fashion from “psychic” elements that are as necessary to psychological experience as sun, air, and water are to plants. But as the individual’s personal experience must be seen in the light of all of these issues, so mass events cannot be understood unless they are considered in a far greater context that unusual.

The question of epidemics, for example, cannot be answered from a biological standpoint alone. It involves great sweeping psychological attitudes on the part of many, and meets the needs and desires of those involved — needs which, in our terms, arise in a framework of religious, psychological and cultural realities that cannot be isolated from biological results.

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I have thus far stayed clear of many important and vital subjects, involving mass realities, because first of all the importance of the individual is to be stressed, and his or her power to form this or her private events. Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions — such as, say, the initiation of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow or governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, flood, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.

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There are no closed systems. This also means that in world terms, events spin like electrons, affecting all psychological and psychic systems as well as biological ones. It is true to say that each individual dies alone, for no one else can die that death. It is also true that part of the species dies with each death, and is reborn with each birth, and that each private death takes place within the greater context of the existence of the entire species. The death serves a purpose species-wise while it also serves the purposes of the individual, for no death comes unbidden.

An epidemic, for example, serves the purposes of each individual who is involved, while it also serves its own functions in the greater species framework.

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When we consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are very obvious: We learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, giving [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s or woman’s own body will combat it, and he or she will become immune.

The shortsightedness of such procedures is generally overlooked because of the definite short-term advantages. As a rule, for example, people inoculated against polio do not develop that disease. Using such procedures, tuberculosis has been largely conquered.

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In the first place, the causes are not biological. Biology is simply the carrier of a “deadly intent.” In the second place, there is a difference between a virus produced in the laboratory and that inhabiting the body — a difference recognized by the body but not by our laboratory instruments.

In a way the body produces antibodies, and sets up natural immunization as a result of say, inoculation. But the body’s chemistry is also confused, for it “knows it is reacting to a disease that is not “a true disease,” but a biologically counterfeit intrusion.

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To that extent — the body’s biological integrity is contaminated. It may at the same time produce antibodies also, for example, to other “similar” diseases, and so overextend its defenses that the individual later comes down with another disease.

No person becomes ill unless that illness serves a psychic or psychological reason, so many people escape such complications. In the meantime, however, scientists and medical men and women find more and more viruses against which the population “must ” be inoculated. Each one is considered singly. There is a rush to develop a new inoculation against the newest virus. Much of this is on predictive basis: The scientists “predict” how many people might be “attacked” by, say, a virus that has caused a given number of deaths. Then as a preventative measure the populace is invited to the new inoculation.

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Many people who would not get the disease in any case are then religiously inoculated with it. The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions. Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.

Inner reality and private experience give birth to all mass events. Man and woman cannot disentangle himself or herself from the natural context of his or her physical life. His or her culture, his or her religion, his or her psychologies, and his or her psychological nature together form the context within which both private and mass events occur. My discussions will be devoted to the nature of the great sweeping emotional, religious, or biological events that often seem to engulf the individual, or to lift him or her willy-nilly in their power.

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What is the relationship between the individual and the gigantic mass motions of nature, of government, or even of religion? What about mass conversions? Mass hysteria? Mass healings, mass murder, and the individual?

 

When we are safely ensconced in a comfortable room…

In no present danger, our senses should assimilate it. It should be an easy enough accomplishment to look around us and see that we are in no danger.

Our conscious mind is meant to give our body an assessment of what I will call cultural conditions, for there are sophistications and specifications that in our terms consciousness alone can assess. If under conditions naturally safe in the terms of primary experience, we become overwhelmed by unsafe signals from secondary experience — that is, from our reading or whatever — we show lack of discrimination. We are not able to differentiate between the physically safe present situation, and the imagined which is perhaps unsafe, calling forth the alarms of danger.

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The body mechanisms become highly disoriented. The signals to the body are very contradictory, so that after a while, if such conditions continue, we can no longer tell whether we are in actual danger or imagined danger. Our mind then forces our body to be in a state of constant alert — but more unfortunately, we train ourselves to ignore our direct, sensual feedback in the present moment.

Our body then might say we are safe, and our senses show us that no danger is present — yet we have begun to rely so upon secondary experience that we do not trust our creature reactions.

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Because of man’s and woman’s great gift of imagination, however, the alarm signals not only invade a safe present moment, but go jangling into the future. To whatever extent, and in whatever fashion, each individual is therefore robbed of his of her beliefs in the personal ability to act meaningfully or with purpose in the present.

The body cannot act tomorrow, today. Its sense data must be clear. This resulting feeling of powerlessness to act leads to a state of hopelessness of varying degrees — and that mood does not tie itself to specific details, but pervades emotional life if it is allowed to. To whatever degree, the condemning, critical material too often becomes self-prophesying — for those who put merit on it allow it to cloud their reactions.

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In our terms, while we live, and in the most pertinent terms of intimate sensation, our reality must be what we perceive in the framework of our time, and what we create within that framework as it is experienced. therefore, I entreat not to behave as if man or woman is an imbecile, doomed to extinction, a dim-witted, half-crazy animal with a brain gone amuck.

None of the prophesied destruction man and woman so fears is a reality in our time; nor, for all of the critical prophets through the ages, and the forerunners of doom, has the creativity of man and woman destroyed its self in those terms.

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There are those who make careers of condemning the faults and failings of others, or of the species itself, and because of that attitude man and woman’s great energy and good intent remain invisible. Man and woman are in the process of becoming. His and her works are flawed — but they are the lawed apprentice works of a genius artist in the making, whose failures are indeed momentous and grotesque only in the light of his senses genius, whichever leads him or her and directs him or her onward.

When we are considering the future in our terms, constructive achievements are as realistic as destructive ones. In those terms, each year of man’s existence in fact justifies a more optimistic rather than pessimistic view. We cannot place man or woman’s good intent outside of the physical context, for outside of that context we do not have the creature that we know. We cannot say that nature is good, but spawned man and woman, which is a cancer upon it, for nature would have better sense.

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We cannot say, either, The Nature — will destroy man and woman if he or she offends her or him, or The Nature — has little use for its own species, but only wants to promote Life– for Nature is within each member of each species; and without each member of each species, Nature — would be non-existent.

Because we are natural creatures, within us there is a natural state of being. That state can be an ever-present reservoir of peace, vitality, and understanding.

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Whatever our scientist think, our body and our consciousness and our universe spring constantly into actualization. Therefore, through cultivating the clear experience of our own consciousness and being with time and with the moment as we feel it, we can draw upon the greater vitality and power that is available.

To do this, reply upon your immediate sense data, not secondary experience as described. That primary sense data, while pinpointed in the present, providing us with the necessary stance in time, still can open up to us the timelessness from which all time emerges, can bring us intuitive intimations, hinting at the true nature of the ever-present coming-to-be of the universe.

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That kind of experience will let us glimpse the larger patterns of man’s and woman’s creativity, and our part in it. We have been taught to concentrate upon criticisms and faults in our society; and in our times it seems that everything will work out wrong — that left alone the world will run down, the universe will die, man and woman will destroy themselves; and these beliefs so infiltrate our behavior that they organize much of our experience and rob us of the benefits nature itself everywhere provides in direct primary experience.

Often then we ignore our senses’ reality in the world — the luxurious vitality and comfort of the daily moment — by exaggerating the importance of secondary experience as defined for this discussion.

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The most negative projection or prophecy seems to be the most practical one; when we are reading of the world’s ills we say in all honesty, and with no humor: “How can I ignore the reality, the destructive reality, of the present?” In the most practical, immediate, mundane terms, however, we and our world are in the moment naturally and physically safe, as our bodily senses immediately perceive. In the most basic of bodily terms we are not reacting to present conditions.

This would be only too clear if we were physically experiencing the conditions about which we might be reading. If the world were falling down about our shoulders, we would only too clearly understand that “earlier” we were reacting to an imagined and not a real situation.

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While disasters, imagined or encounter second-handedly, may in fact later occur, they are far different from physically encountered ones. We only add to their unfortunate nature by negatively brooding upon what might happen in the future, and we destroy our own stance. Our stance in time is highly important, for it is our practical base of operations.

We must trust our sense data in that regard. Otherwise we confuse our psychological and corporal stance, for the body cannot be in a situation of safety and danger at the same time. It wastes its resources fighting imaginary battles.

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To some people wars, poverty, murder, treachery, corruption, are primary experience and must be dealt with — as requiring immediate action. The body must react. Such persons are beaten up, or robbed. Those are immediate sense data, and in one way or another, they do react. However feebly, their point of power corresponds immediately with the point of danger.

We cannot react physically in the same way to projected or imagined dangers. Some install a security system like those from www.verisure for peace of mind, others keep a bat by their bedside or a pepper spray in their purse. Each of these solutions is for an anticipated danger, but when the danger comes? There seems to be no possible reaction. We are frustrated. We are meant to deal with our immediate, primary experience, and in so doing we take care of our responsibility. We are able to take action in our own experience, and therefore affect others. We do not have to be ignorant of wars in other corners of the world or close our eyes. But if we allow those experiences to over-cloud our present, valid intersection with reality, then we speak and act from a position not our own, and deny the world whatever benefits our own present version of reality might allow us to give.

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The natural creature-validity of our senses must remain clear, and only then can we take full advantage of those intuitions and visions that must come through our own private intersection with space and time.

In those terms, the ever-actual integrity of nature everywhere surrounds us. It represents our direct experience. It offers comfort, creativity, and inspiration that we only impede if we allow the secondary experience to supersede our daily moment-to-moment encounter with the physical earth.

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The sleeping and waking portions of life on earth.

A Tiger, following its nature is not evil

Looking at our own species we are often less kindly, less compassionate, less understanding. It is easy to condemn our own kind.

It may be difficult sometimes for us to understand, but our species means well. We understand that the tiger exists in a certain environment, and reacts according to his nature. So does man and woman. Even his or her atrocities are committed in a distorted attempt to reach what we consider good goals. He and she fails often to achieve the goals, or even to understand how his or her very methods prevent their attainment.

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He and she as indeed as blessed as the animals, however, and his or her failures are the results of his or her lack of understanding. He or she is directly faced with a far more complex conscious world than the other animals are, dealing particularly with symbols and ideas that are then projected out ward into reality, where they are to be tested. If they could be tested mentally in our context, there would be no need for physical human existence.

Too many complicated issues are connected here, so that I must at best simplify. It is as if man and woman said: “Now what about this idea? What can we do with it? What will happen if we toss it out into reality, physically? How far can we go with any of the great social, scientific, religious ideas that are so peculiarly the offshoots of man’s and woman’s mind?”

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If such issues could all be mentally worked out on some non-physical drawing board, again, the great challenge of physical existence would be neither necessary nor meaningful. How far, say, can nationalism be carried? To what extent can the world be treated as if it were external to man and woman, as an object? What can man or woman learn by treating the body as if it were a machine? As if it were a mirage? As if it were driven by blind instinct? As if it were possessed by a soul?

To some extent, these are all unique and creative ponderings that on the part of the animals alone would be considered the most curious and enlightening intellectual achievements. The animals must relate to the earth, and so must man and woman. As the animal must play, mate, hunt his prey or eat his berries within the physical context of sun, ground, trees, snow, hail and wind, so in a different way man and woman must pursue his/her ideas by clothing them in the elemental realities of earth, by perceiving them as events.

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When he or she is destructive, man or woman does not seek to be destructive per se; but in a desire to achieve that which he or she thinks of as particular goal that to him or her is good, he or she forgets to examine the goodness of his or her methods.

One animal chasing and killing its prey serves the greater purpose of preserving the balance of nature, whether or not the animal is aware of this — and again, the animal’s intent is not evil. Man and woman consumes ideas. In so doing he or she contributes to a different kind of balance, of which he or she is usually unaware. But no man or woman truly acts out of pure intent to do wrong, or to be vicious. Storms rend the summer sky, sending forth thunder and lightening. Earthquakes may ravage the countryside. We may deeply regret the havoc worked, knowing that neither the storm nor the earthquake is evil. Not only did they have no wrong intent, but the overall conditions corrected the earth’s balance.

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This requires some unique understanding. The destructive storms worked by mankind ultimately cannot be said to be any more evil than the earthquake. While man’s and woman’s works may often certainly appear destructive, we must not blame man’s or woman’s intent, nor must we ever make the error of confusing man and woman with their works. For many well-intentioned artists, with the best of intentions, produce at times shoddy works of art, all the more disappointing and deplorable to them because of the initial goodness of their intent.

Their lack of knowledge and techniques and methods then become quite plain. By concentrating too deeply upon the world of newspapers and the negative reports of man’s and woman’s actions, it is truly easy to lose sight of each man’s and each woman’s basic good intent.

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That intent may be confused, poorly executed, tangled amid conflicts of beliefs, strangled by the bloody hands of murders and wars — and yet no man or woman ever loses it. That represents the hope of the species, and it has ever remained lit, like a bright light within each member of the species; and that good intents is handed down through the generations. It is far more potent, that illumination, then any hates or national grudges that may also be passed along.

It is imperative, for any peace of mind, that we believe in that existence of man’s or woman’s innate good intent.

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It is shared by all of the other animals. Each animal knows that under certain conditions the other may fight or posture aggressively, or defend its nest. Each animal knows that in time of hunger it might be hunted by another. Except for those situations, however, the animals are not afraid of each other. They know that each other animal is of good intent.

We should grant our own species the same. We can collect books of man’s and woman’s failures. Why would anyone collect the worst works of any artist, and get pleasure in ripping them apart? Man and woman has produced some fine works: The high level of verbal communication, the multitudinous varieties of emotional interactions and of cultural exchange, the facility with exteriorization of ideas and concepts, the reaches of the imagination — all of these, and many others, are unique in the universe.

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To identify man or woman with their poorest works is to purposefully seek out the mars, the mistakes, of fine artist, and then to condemn him or her. To do this is to condemn ourselves personally. If a scientist says consciousness is the result of chance, or Darwin’s theories say that basically man and woman is a triumphant son and daughter of murderers, many people object. If we say, however, that men and women are idiots, or that they are not worth the ground they walk upon, we are saying the same thing. For we must be concerned with this reality as we know it; in those terms, to condemn man or woman is to condemn the species as we know it, and the practical terms of our world.

To say that people can escape to another probability is pragmatically a cop-out — this is apart from the reality of probabilities, for I am speaking from our emotional viewpoint.

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Physically our body has a stance in space and time. Speaking of primary and secondary experience. Let us call primary experience that which exists immediately in sense terms in our moment of time — the contact of body with environment. Creating certain divisions there to make our discussion easier. Therefore, I will call secondary experience that information that comes to us through, say, reading, television, discussion with others, letters, and so forth.

The secondary kind of experience is largely symbolic. This should be clear. Reading about a war in the middle of a quiet sunny afternoon is not the same thing as being in the war, however vivid the description. Reading about the energy shortage is not the same as sitting in a cold house. Reading about the possible annihilation of man-womankind through nuclear destruction or other stupidities, while we are sitting calmly enough in our living room, is obviously far divorced from the actuality described in an article.

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At the levels with which we are concerned, the body must primarily react to present, immediate, primary existence in space and time. At other levels it is equipped to handle many kinds of data, i.e. The precognition of cells. But the body depend on the conscious mind to give it a clear assessment of precise conditions of the space and time it occupies. It depends upon that knowledge.

When we ask about the beginning of a universe, we are speaking of a visible universe.

There is consciousness within each conceivable hypothetical point within the universe. There is therefore “an invisible universe” out of which the visible or objective universe springs.

I do not mean to overemphasize the point that this particular material is most difficult to explain, yet I can hardly stress the issue too strongly.

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Our universe did not emerge at any one point, therefore, or with any one initial cell — but everywhere it began to exist at once, as the inner pulsations of the invisible universe reached certain intensities that “impregnated” the entire physical system simultaneously.

In this case, first of all light appeared. At the same time Electromagnetic Energy units became manifest, impinging from the invisible universe into definition. Again, because of the psychological strength of preconceived notions, I try to work around many of our concepts. Yet in much of this material is implied, but the implications must have passed on to the reader.

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For example, the universe expands as an idea does, and so the visible universe sprang into being in the same manner. The whole affair is quite complicated since — the world freshly springs into new creativity at each moment. No matter what our version of creativity, of the creation of the world, we are stuck with questions of where such energy came from, for it seems that unimaginable energy was released more or less at one time, and that this energy must then run out.

The same energy, however, still gives birth to the universe. In those terms, it is still being created. The Electromagnetic Energy units, impressing a probable physical field, contain within them the latent knowledge of all of the various species that can emerge under those conditions. The groupings “begin” in the invisible universe. We can say that it took untold centuries for the Electromagnetic Energy units “initially” to combine, form classifications of matter and various species; or we can say that this process happened at once. It is according to our relative position, but the physical universe was everywhere seeded, impregnated, simultaneously. On the other hand, this still happens, and there is no real “coming-in” point.

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We distinguish between consciousness and our own version, which we consider consciousness of self. When I speak of atoms and molecules having consciousness, I mean that they possess a consciousness of themselves as identities. I do not mean that they love or hate, in our terms, but that they are aware of their own separateness, and aware of the ways in which that separateness cooperates to form other organizations.

They are innately aware, in fact, of all such probable cooperative ventures, and imbued with the “drive” for value fulfillment. Every known species was inherently “present” with the overall impregnation of the visible universe, then.

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If the universe were a painting, for example, the painter would not have first painted darkness, then an explosion, then a cell, then the joining together of groups of cells into a simple organism, then that organism’s manipulation into others like it, or traced a pattern from an amoeba or a paramecium on upward — but he or she would have instead begun with a panel of light, an underpainting, in which all of the world’s organisms were included, though not in detail. Then in a creativity that came from the painting itself the colors would grow rich, the species attain their delineations, the winds blow and the seas move with the tides.

The motion and energy of the universe still come from within. I certainly realize that this is hardly a scientific statement — yet the moment the All That Is conceived of a physical universe it was invisibly created, endowed with creativity, and bound to emerge.

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Because each hypothetical, conceivable portion of the universe is conscious, the Planner is within the plan itself in the greatest of terms — perhaps basically inconceivable to us. There is of course no “outside” into which the invisible universe materialized, since all does indeed exist in a mental, psychic, or spiritual realm quite impossible to describe. To us our universe seems, now, objective and real, and it seems to us that at one time at least this was not the case, so we ask its creation and the evolution of the species. The answer has been couched in the terms in which the question if generally asked.

While we believe in and experience the passage of time, then such questions will naturally occur to us, and in that fashion. Within that framework they make sense. When we begin to question the nature of time itself, then the “when” of the universe is beside the point.

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Almost anyone will agree, I hope, that the universe is a most splendid example of creativity. Few would agree, however, that we can learn more about nature of the universe by examining our own creativity than we can by examining the world through instruments — and here is exquisite irony, for we create the instruments of creativity, even while at the same time we often spout theories that deny to man and woman all but most mechanical of reactions.

In other terms, the world comes to know itself, to discover itself, for the Planner left room for divine surprise, and the plan was nowhere foreordained; nor is there anywhere within it anything that corresponds to our survival-of-the-fittest theories.

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These are creative distortions on our part, directly related to specializations of consciousness that cut us off from the greater concourse existing at other levels between the species and the land. Again, consciousness everywhere pervades the universe, and is aware of all conditions. The balance of nature upon our planet is no chance occurrence, but the result of constant, instant computations on the part of each most minute consciousness, whether it forms part of a rock, a person, an animal, a plant. Each invisibly “holds space together,” whatever its station. This is a cooperative venture. Our own consciousness has its particular unique qualities, in that like other comparatively long-lived species, we associate our identity with our form far more rigidly. Other kinds of consciousness “leap in and out of forms” with greatest leeway. There is a biological understanding that exists, for example, when one animal kills another one for food. The consciousness of the prey leaves its body under the impetus of a kind of stimulus unknown to us.

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The natural interplay among the animals. This is not anywhere meant to justify the cruel slaughtering of animals by man and woman under many circumstances

 

The species has a physical past, And a psychological past

No experiences are ever lost. The most private event is still written in the mass psyche of the species. In terms of past, present and future. We can only understand some concepts when they are given in that fashion. Taking that for granted, then, we are each born with the conscious knowledge of what has come before. Our brain is far from an empty slate, waiting for the first imprint of experience; it is already equipped with complete “equations,” telling us who we are and where we have come from. Nor do we wipe that slate clean, symbolically speaking, before we write our life upon it. Instead, we draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of our ancestors, back — in our terms now — through time immemorial.

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The individual is born equipped with his or her humanness, with certain propensities and leanings toward development. He or she knows what human voices sound like even before his or her ear physically hear those sounds. He or she is born wanting to form civilizations as, for example, beavers want to form dams.

Children’s dreams activate inner psychological mechanisms, and at a time when their age makes extensive physical knowledge of their world impossible. In dreams they are given information regarding that environment.

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Physical feedback is of course necessary for development, and a child deprived of it will not fully mature. Yet the development of dreams follow inner patterns that activate the child’s growth, and stimulate its development. There are even key dreams in infancy that serve to trigger necessary hormonal functioning. The child crawls and walks in dreams before those acts are physically executed — the dreams serving as impetus for muscular coordination and development.

Language is practiced by infants in the dream state, and it is indeed that mental practice that result in children speaking sentences far more quickly than otherwise would seem possible. The dream world, then, develops faster than physical experience. For some time the child is more secure there. Without dreaming there would be no learning, nor would there be memory.

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Events are processed in dreams; put in the necessary perspective,, sorted and arranged. This is done when the conscious mind is separated from direct involvement with physical events. Dreams serve to dull the impact of the day’s events just past, while the meaning of those activities sifts through the various levels of the personality, settling into compartments of intent and belief. Often the true impact of an event does not occur until it has been interpreted or re-experienced through a dream.

Because dreams follow paths of association, they break through time barriers, allowing the individual to mix, match, and compare events from different periods of his or her life. All of this is done somewhat in the way that child plays, through the formation of creative dream dramas in which the individual is free to play a million different roles and to examine the nature of probable events from the standpoint of “a game.”

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In play, children adopt certain rules and conditions “for a time.” The child can stop at any time. Innumerable play events can occur with varying intensity, yet generally speaking the results cease when the game is over. The child plays at being an adult, and is a child again when his or her parents call, so the effect of the game are not long lasting. Still, they are an important part of a child’s daily life, and they affect the way he or she relates to others. So in dreams, the events have effects only while dreaming. They do not practically intrude into waking hours — the attaching bear vanishes when we open our eyes; it does not physically chase us around the bedroom.

The great versatility of the species in its reaction to events is highly dependent upon this kind of dreaming capacity. The species tries out its probable reactions to probable events in the dream state, and hence is better prepared for action “in the future.”

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To some extent dreams are participated in by cellular consciousness also, for the cells have an equal interest in the individual’s psychic and body events. In a way dreams are of course composite behavior — mental and psychic games that suit the purposes of mind and body alike. Feedback from the physical environment may trigger an alarming dream that causes the individual to awaken.

Certain chemicals may affect dreaming by altering the cells’ reality. Many sleeping pills are detrimental, in that they inhibit the body’s natural response to its environment while an individual is sleeping , and deaden the intimate relationship between the dreaming mind and the sleeping body.

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Because we have very limited ideas of what logic is, it seems to us that the dreaming self is not critical, or “logical”; yet it works with amazing discrimination, sifting data, sending some to certain portions of the body, and structuring memory. Sleeping pills also impede the critical functions of dreams that are so often overlooked. The facts are that dreams involve high acts of creativity. Theses are not only intuitively base, but formed with a logic far surpassing our ideas of that quality. These creative acts are then fitted together through associative processes that come together most precisely to form the dream events.

It should certainly be obvious that dreams are not passive events. Some rival physical events in intensity and even effect. They involve quite active coordination on the part of mind and body, and they bring to the individual experience otherwise unattainable.

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Small amounts of ordinary stimulators, such as coffee or tea, taken before bed when we are already sleepy, have a beneficial effect in stimulating dream activity and aiding dream recall. Too large a serving, of course, could simply waken us, but small amounts taken if we are already drowsy allow us to take our conscious mind into the dream state more readily, where it can act as observer.

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A very small amount of alcohol can also serve. Anything that suppresses activity will also suppress our dreams. As is known, anyone deprived of sufficient dreaming will most likely begin to hallucinate while in the waking state, for too much experience has built up that needs processing. There are many secondary hormonal activities that take place in the dream state and at no other time. Even cellular growth and revitalization are accelerated while the body sleeps.

In play children often imaginatively interchange their sexes

The young selfhood is freer in its identification, and as yet has not been taught to identify its own personality with its sex exclusively.

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In the dreams of children this same activity continues, so that the boy may have many dream experiences as a girl, and the girl as a boy. More than this, however, in children’s dreams as in their play activity, age variances are also frequent. The young child dreaming of its own future counterpart, for example, attains a kind of psychological projection into the future of its world. Adults censor many of their own dreams so that the frequent changes in sexual orientation are not remembered.

Play then at another game, and pretend that you are of opposite sex. Do this after an encounter in which the conventions of sex have a played a part. Ask your self how many of your current beliefs would be different if your sex was. If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

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Our beliefs about dreams color our memory and interpretation of them, so that at the point of waking, with magnificent psychological duplicity, we often make last minute adjustments that bring our dreams more in line with our conscious expectations. This sexual symbols usually attached to dream images are highly simplistic, for example. They program us to interpret our dreams in a given manner.

We do have a “dream memory” as a species, with certain natural symbols. There are individually experienced, with great variations. The studies done on men and women dreamers are already prejudiced, however, both by the investigators and by the dreamers themselves. Men remember “manly” dreams — generally speaking, now — while women in the same manner remember dreams that they believe suit their sex according to their beliefs.

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People often program their waking memory in quite the same fashion. The psyche, again, not only has no one sexual identification, but it is the larger psychic and psychological bank or potentials from which all gradations of sexuality emerge. It is not sexual, and yet it is the combination of those richest ingredients considered to be male and female.

The human personality is therefore endowed sexually and psychologically with a freedom from strict sexual orientation. This has contributed to the survival of the species by not separating any of its mental or psychological abilities into two opposite camps. Except for the physical processes of reproduction, the species is free to arrange its psychological characteristics in whatever fashions it chooses. There is no inner programming that says otherwise.

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In dreams this psychological complexity is more apparent. Because of programming, many people refrain from natural reactions of a most harmless nature, and these are often given expression in the dream state. Those dreams, however, are precisely the ones least remembered — the censoring is so habitual. The male’s aggressive tendencies, often taken as basic characteristics of the species itself, are a case in point. This is an exaggerated, learned aggressive response, not natural in those terms in our species, or as interpreted in any other species.

This artificial aggressiveness has nothing to do either, basically, with the struggle for survival. It is the direct result of the fact that the male has been taught to deny the existence within himself of certain basic emotions. This means that he denies a certain portion of his own humanity, and then is forced to overreact in expressing those emotions left open to him. The reasons for such a lopsided focus? The male chose to take upon himself a kind of specialization of consciousness that, carried too far, leads to a hard over-objectivity. Only in dreams in our time, in our society, is male free to cry unabashedly, to admit any kind of dependency, and only at certain occasions and usually in relative privacy is he allowed to express feelings of love.

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His rage turns outward as aggression. It is the highest idiocy, however, to project that artificial aggression outward upon the animal kingdom in general. Such beliefs invisibly affect all of our studies — and worse, they help us misread the activity in nature itself.

Those who imagine they look upon nature with the most objective or eyes are those whose subjective beliefs blind them most of all for they cannot see through their own misinterpretations. It has been said that statistics can be made to say two things at once, both contradictory; so the facts of nature can be read in completely different fashions as they are put together with the organizational abilities of the mind operating through the brain’s beliefs. The exterior core of dreams is also blemished to that degree, but the inner core of dreams provides a constant new influx of material, feedback, and insight from the psyche, so that the personality is not at the mercy of its exterior experience only — not confined to environmental feedback only, but ever provided with fresh intuitive data and direction.

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Even is such dreams are not recalled, they circulate through the psychological system, so to speak. They are responsible for the inventiveness and creativity of the species, even bringing new comprehensions that can be used to bear upon the life of the physical world.

Consciousness is too creative to confine its activities in one direction

Consciousness enjoys its physical orientation. Dreams provide consciousness with its own creative play, therefore, when it need not be so practical or so “mundane,” allowing it to use its innate characteristics more freely.

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Many people are aware of double or triple dreams, when they seem to have two or three simultaneous dreams.. Usually upon the point of awakening, such dreams suddenly telescope into one that is predominant, with the others taking subordinate positions, though the dreamer is certain that in the moment before the dream were equal in intensity. Such dreams are representative of the great creativity of consciousness, and hint of it ability to carry on more than one line of experience at one time without losing track or itself.

In Physical waking life, we must do one thing or another, generally speaking. Obviously I am simplifying, since we can eat an orange, watch television, scratch our foot, and yell at the dog — all more or less at the same time. We cannot, however, be in Boston and San Francisco at the same time, or be 21 years of age and 11 at the same time.

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In double dreams and triple dreams consciousness shows its transparent, simultaneous nature. Several lines of dream experience can be encountered at the same time, each complete in itself, but when the dreamer wakes to the fact, the experience cannot be neurologically translated; so one dream usually predominates, with the others more like ghost images.

There are too many varieties of such dreams to discuss here, but they all involve consciousness dispersing, yet retaining its identity, consciousness making loops with itself. Such dreams involve other sequences than the ones with which we are familiar. They hint at the true dimensions of consciousness that are usually unavailable to us, for we actually form our own historical world in the same manner, in that above all other experiences that one world is predominant, and played on the screen of our brain.

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Take a very simple event like eating of an orange. Playfully imagine how that event is interpreted by the cells of your body. How is the orange perceived? It might be directly felt by the tip of your finger, but are the cells in your feet aware of it? Do the cells in your knee know you are eating an orange?

Take all the time you want with this. Then explore your own conscious sense perceptions of the orange. Dwell on its taste, texture, odor, shape. Again, do this playfully, and take your time. Then let your own association flow in our mind. What does the orange remind you of? When did you first see or taste one? Have you ever seen oranges grow, or orange blossoms? What does the color remind you of?

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Then pretend you are having a dream that begins with the image of an orange. Follow the dream in your mind. Next, pretend that you are waking from the dream to realize that another dream was simultaneously occurring, and ask yourself quickly what the dream was. Followed in the same sequence given, the exercise will allow you to make loops with your own consciousness, so to speak, to catch it “coming and going.” And the last question — what else were you dreaming of? — Should bring an entirely new sequence of images and thoughts into your mind that were indeed happening at the same time as your daydream about the orange.

These feel and practice of these exercises are their important points — the manipulation of a creative consciousness. We exist outside of our present context, but such statements are meaningless, practically speaking, unless we give oneself some freedom to experience events outside of that rigid framework. These exercises alter our usual organizations, and hence allow us to encounter experience in a fresher fashion.

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A double dream is like the double life lived by some people who have two families — one in each town — and who seemingly manipulate separate series of events that other people would find most confusing. If the body can only follow certain sequences, still consciousness has inner depths of action that do not show on the surface line of experience. Double dreams are clues to such activity.

While each person generally follows a given strand of consciousness, and identifies with it as “myself,” there are other alternate lines beneath the surface. They are also quite as legitimately the same identity, but they are not focused upon because the body must have one clear, direct mode of action.

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These strands are like double dreams that continue. They are serve as a framework to the recognized self. In periods of stress or challenge the recognized self may sense these other strains of consciousness, and realize that a fuller experience is possible, a greater psychological thickness. On some occasions in the dream state the recognized self may then enlarge its perception enough to take advantage of these other portions of its own identity. Double or triple dreams may represent such encounters at times. Consciousness always seeks the richest, most creative form, while ever maintaining its own integrity. The imagination, playing, the arts and dreaming, allow it to enrich its activities by providing feedback other than that received in the physical environment itself.