Category Archives: Lessons

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.

We have inner senses that correlate with our physical ones

These, however, do not have to be trained to a particular space-time orientation.

When children dream, they utilize these inner senses as adults do, and then through dreaming they learn to translate such material into the precise framework of the exterior senses. Children’s games are always “in the present” — that is, they are immediately experienced, though the play events may involve the future or the past. The phrase “once upon a time” is strongly evocative and moving, even to adults, because children play with time in a way that adults have forgotten. If we want to sense the motion of our psyche, it is perhaps easiest to imagine a situation either in the past or the future, for this automatically moves our mental sense-perceptions in a new way. Children try to imagine what the world was like before they entered it. Do the same thing. The way you follow these directions can be illuminating, for the areas of activity we choose will tell us something about the unique qualities of our own consciousness. Adult games deal largely with manipulations in space, while children’s play, again, often involves variations in time. Look at a natural object, say a tree; if it is spring now, then imagine that we see it in the fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is an inner knack, allowing for greater sensitivity to the feelings of others than we presently acknowledge. That knack will be activated. Again, the powers of the brain come from the mind, so while we learn to center our consciousness in our body — and necessarily so — nevertheless our inner perceptions roam a far greater range. Before sleep, then, imagine your consciousness traveling down a road, or across the world — whatever you want. Forget you body. Do not try to leave it for this exercise. Tell yourself that you are imaginatively traveling.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

The brain is primarily an event-forming psycho-mechanism…

Through which consciousness operates. Its propensity for event-forming is obvious even in young children. By obvious, I mean active, when fantasies occur involving activities far beyond the physical abilities as they thus far developed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physical events are the end products of non-physical properties

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

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

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

Our beliefs form our reality, and this means that our beliefs structure the events we experience.

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

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

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

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

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

Our thoughts are also as natural as our cells. Our thoughts propel us toward survival and growth also, and in the same way that cells do. If we find oneself in physical difficulties health-wise, we cannot say: “Why doesn’t my body stop me and assert its own wisdom?” Because in the truest sense there is no division between our thoughts and our body. Our thoughts multiply even as our cells do. Our thinking is meant to ensure our survival in those terms, as much as our body mechanism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The events of our life will follow a similar structure. Before conditioning, children’s play follows the love of performance, of body or imagination, for performance’s sake only; the expansion of mental or physical abilities. The most satisfying of events involve those characteristics. The exercises will have to do with the natural joyful manipulation of the imagination that children employ.

The workings of the inner psyche, And activity behind dreams.

Some experiences exist beyond the framework of verbalization or images, and deals basically with the nature and behavior of psychological and psychic energy.

We are are a personified energy source. We give birth to dream images of our own — hardly aware that we have done so, unconscious of the fact that we have provided impetus for a kind of psychological reality that quite escapes our notice. The dream stories we begin continue on their own. No dream is stillborn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man’s mind exuberantly plays with itself. In dreams it uses all those splendid energetic abilities freely, without the necessity for physical feedback, caution, or questioning. It seeks realities, giving birth to psychological patterns. It uses itself fully in mental activity in the same way that the kitten does in physical play.

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

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

Almost any question that we can ask of God, can be asked of the Psyche as well.

It seems to us that we know ourselves, but that we take the existence of our psyche on faith. At best, it often seems that we are all that we know of our psyche, and we will complain that we do not know oneself to begin with. When we say: “I want to find myself,” we usually take it for granted that there is a completed, done, finished version of oneself that we have mislaid somewhere. When we think of finding God, we often think in the same terms.

We are “around ourselves” all the time. We are ever becoming oneself. In a manner of speaking we are “composed” of those patterns of oneself that are everywhere coming together. We cannot help but be oneself. Biologically, mentally, and spiritually we are marked as apart from all others, and no cloak of conventionally can ever hide that unutterable uniqueness. We cannot help but be ourselves.

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In a way, physically we are a molecular language that communicates to others, but a language with its own peculiarities, as if speaking an accepted tongue we spoke with a biological accent that carried its own flavor and meaning.

When we ask: “What is my psyche, or my soul, or who am I?” we are seeking of course for our own meaning as apart from what we already know about oneself. In that context, God and the psyche are constantly expanding– unutterable, and always becoming.

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We will question, most likely, “Becoming what?” for to us it usually seems that all motion tends toward a stat of completion of one kind or another. We think, therefore, in terms of becoming perfect, or becoming free. The word “becoming” by itself seems to leave us up in the air, so to speak, suspended without definitions. If I say: “You are becoming what you already are,” then my remark sounds meaningless, for if you already are, how can you become what is already accomplished? In larger terms, however, what we are is always vaster than our knowledge of oneself, for in physical life we cannot keep up with our own psychological and psychic activity.

In a way our bodies speak a biological language, but in those terms we are bilingual, to say the least. We deal with certain kinds of organizations. They can be equated with biological verbs, adjectives and nouns. These result in certain time sequences that can be compared to sentences, written and read from one side, say, to the other.

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Pretend that our life’s experience is a page of a book that we write, read, and experience from top to bottom, left to right, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. That is the you that you know– the wold view that we understand. But other quite as legitimate “yous” may write, read, and experience the same page backwards, or read each letter downward and back up again, as we would a column of figures. Or others might mix and match the letters in entirely different fashions altogether, forming entirely different sentences. Still another, vaster you might be aware of all the different methods of experiencing that particular page, which is our life as we understand it.

We think that our own consciousness is the only logical culmination of our body’s reality. We read oneself in a certain accepted fashion. In the “entire book of life,” however, just physically speaking, there are interrelationships on adjacent levels that we do not perceive, as other portions of our own biological consciousness or biological language relate to the entire living fabric of the world. In physical terms we are alive because of substructures — psychic, spiritual, and biological — of which we have hardly any comprehension at all.

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These are implied, however, in the nature of our own consciousness, which could not exist otherwise as we know it. As language gains and attains its meaning not only by what is included in it, but also by what is excluded, so our consciousness attains its stability also by exclusions.

What we are is implied in the nature of what we are not. By the same token, we are what we are because of the existence of what we are not.

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We read ourselves from the top of the page to the bottom, or from what we think of as the beginning to the end. Our greater reality, however, is read in terms of intensities, so that the psyche puts us together in a different way. The psyche does not mark time. To it the intense experiences of our life exist simultaneously. In our terms they would be the psyche’s present. The psyche deals with probable events, however, so some events– perhaps some that we dreamed of but did not materialize — are quite real to the psyche. They are far more real to it than most innocuous but definite physical events, as for example yesterday morning’s breakfast.

God and psyche

The inner events of the psyche compose the greater experience from which physical events arrive. They cast an aura that almost magically make our life our own. Even as two people encountered precisely the same events in their lives at precisely the same time, their experiences of reality would still hardly be approximately connected.