Category Archives: METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES

Let us take tours through psychological realities

Or tours through psychic lands rather than physical ones. Such journeys “Take no time” in our terms.

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We have a storm. Weathermen or weather women speak of local conditions and merging air currents. We are in a realm where consciousnesses merge. A constant state of growth, expansion, and development. We can travel to many great universities of the mind.

Much of this is difficult to explain, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed — almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself. Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it. It is magnified and yet refined. It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself. We can exchange with each other a more complicated system of reality than any computer could handle. We do not understand or perceive the ways in which our reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that we experience. Unconsciously, each individual participants in forming that world. The primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, and intersection of consciousnesses that is then physically experienced.

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The encounters themselves occur in a Framed-mind-3 environment. That framework of course, again in terms of an analogy, exists another step away from our own Framed-mind-2. I do not want to get into a higher-or-lower hierarchy here, but the frameworks represent spheres of action. Our encounters initially take place, then, beyond the sphere that deals exclusively with either our physical world or the inner mental and psychic realm from which our present experience springs.

Like as motes of dust might be swept along with a brisk autumn wind from one area to another. We are carried above the land of our usual perception so that portions of us glimpse subjective states. These arouse our curiosity even when consciously we are not aware of perceiving them. That curiosity acts as impetus.

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Our intents and concerns, our interests, our needs and desires, our characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead us to it to begin with.

We want to make the material workable in our world — a natural and quite understandable desire. The proof is in the pudding, and so forth. Yet of course we are also participators in an immense drama in which the main actions occur outside of our world, in those realms from which our world originated — and we are, foremost, natives of those other realms, as each individual is; each being is.

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Those realms are far from lonely, dark, and chaotic. They are also quite different from any concept of nirvana or nothingness. They are composed of ever-spiraling states of existence in which different kinds of consciousnesses meet and communicate. They are not impersonal realms, but are involved in the most highly intimate inter-actions. Those interactions exist about us all the while, and I would like us in our thoughts to aspire toward them, to try to stretch our perceptions enough so that we become at least somewhat aware of their existence.

These frameworks, while I speak of them separately, exist one within the other, and each one impinges upon the other. To some extent we are immersed in all realities.

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If we could, try to sense this greater context in which we have our being. Our rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptance of the idea. Do not forget the vaster context. Which will trigger responses on our part, increasing still further the scope of knowledge that we can receive.

In our world knowledge must be translated into specifics, yet we also deal with emotional realities that cannot be so easily deciphered. In the atmosphere now, there are hints of those undecipherable yet powerful realities that will, in time, gradually be described in verbal terms that make sense to us.

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According to our understanding, our own comprehensions and perceptions will bring other clues, either in the waking or the dream state. Keep our minds open for them, but without any preconceived ideas of how they might appear. Development triggers certain psychic activity that then triggers further growth.

To some extent Framed-mind-1 and 2 is of course an example of an entire idea, for we receive a good deal of information of physical life. Still they must be colored by our ideas of what physical lives are.

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Even our concepts of creativity are necessarily influenced by Framed-mind-1 thinking, of course.

Acts of creativity best approach the workings of Framed-mind-2, for [those] acts always involve leaps of faith and inspiration, and the breaking of barriers.

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When we are writing, we draw upon associations, memories, and events that are known to us and others, that perhaps we had forgotten but that suddenly spring to mind in answer to our intent and following our associations. When an artist is painting a landscape, he might unconsciously compare hundreds of landscapes viewed in the past in multitudinous, seemingly forgotten hues that splash upon the grass or trees, or as he seeks for a new creative combination. Art is his or her focus so that he draws from Framed-mind-2 all of those pertinent data that are necessary for his or her painting. Not just technique is concerned, but the entire visual experience of his or her life.

Framed-mind-2 involves a far vaster creative activity, in which our life is the art involved — and all [of the] ingredients for its success are there, available. When we are creating a product or a work of art, the results will have much to do with our idea of what the product is, or what the work of art is — so our ideas about our life, or life itself, will also have much to do with our experience of it as a living art.

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If we believe in the laws of cause and effect, as accepted, or in the laws of polarity, as accepted, then we will be bound by those laws, for they will represent our artistic technique. We will believe that we must use them in order to, say, paint the living portrait of our life. We will therefore structure our experience, drawing to oneself from Framed-mind-2 only that which fits. We will not have the “technique” to attract other experience, and as long as we stick with one technique our life-pictures will more or less have a certain monotony.

Write and artist also bring more into his or her work than the simple ability to write or paint. In one way or another all of his or her experience is involved. When we pay attention to Framed-mind-1 primarily, It is as if we have learned to write simple sentences with one word neatly before the other. We have not really learned true expression. In our life we are writing sentences like “See Tommy run.” Our mind is not really dealing with concepts but with the simple perception of objects, so that little imagination is involved. We can express the location of objects in space, and we can communicate to others in similar fashion, confirming the physical obvious properties that others also perceive.

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In those terms, using our analogy, the recognition of Framed-mind-2 would bring us from that point to the production of great art, where words served to express not only the seen but the unseen — not simply facts but feelings and emotions — and where the words themselves escaped their consecutive patterns, sending the emotions into realms that quite defied both space and time.

Now and then people have such moments, and yet each private reality has its existence in an eternal creativity from which, our world springs.

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It is not as if that vaster reality were utterly closed to our perception, for it is not. To some extent it is everywhere apparent in each person’s private experience, and it is obviously stated in the very existence of our world itself. The religions, in one way or another, have always perceived it, although the attempt to interpret that reality in terms of the recognized facts of the world is bound to distort it.

Our world, then, is the result of a multidimensional creative venture, a work of art in terms almost impossible for us to presently understand, in which each person and creature, and each particle, plays a living part. Again, in Framed-mind-2 each event is known, form the falling of a leaf to the falling of a star, from the smallest insect’s experience on a summer day to the horrendous murder of an individual on a city street. Those events are not divorced from our reality, not thrust upon us, not apart from our experience. It often only seems to be because we so compartmentalize our own experience that we automatically separate ourselves from such knowledge.

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Creativity does not deal with compartments. It throws aside barriers. Even most people who are involved in creative work often apply their additional insights and knowledge only to their art, however — not to their lives. They fall back to cause and effect.

Framed-mind-1 life is, again, based on the idea that we have only so much energy, that we will wear out, and that a certain expenditure of energy will produce a given amount of work — in other words, that applied effort of a certain kind will produce the best results. In the same way, it is believed that the energy of the universe will die out. All of this presupposes “the fact” that no energy is inserted into the world. The source of the world would therefore seem no longer to exist, having worn itself out in the effort to produce physical phenomena. In the light of such thinking, Framed-mind-2 would be an impossibility.

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Instead, the energy of life is inserted constantly into our world, in a way that has nothing to do with our so-called physical laws. The universe expands as an idea does. The greater life of each creature exist in the framework that “originally” gave it birth, and in a greater manner of speaking each creature, regardless of its age, is indeed being constantly reborn. Couched in our terms of our world’s known reality, which deal with local properties of Framed-mind-2 as they have impact in our experience.

Men’s and Women’s private roles in the nature of mass events

We must first look into the medium in which events appear concrete and real. The great sweep of the events of nature can be understood only by looking into a portion of their reality that is not apparent to us. We want to examine, therefore, the inner power of natural occurrences.

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A scientist examining nature studies its exterior, observing the outsideness of nature. Even investigative work involving atoms and molecules, or [theoretical] faster-than-light particles, concern the particle nature of reality. The scientist does not usually look for nature’s heart. He or she certainly does not pursue the study of its soul.

All being is manifestation of energy — an emotional manifestation of energy. Man or woman can interpret the weather in terms of air pressure and wind currents. He or she can look to fault lines in an effort to understand earthquakes. All of this works at a certain level, to a certain degree. Man’s or woman’s psyche, however, is emotionally not only a part of his or her physical environment, but intimately connected with all of nature’s manifestations. Using the terms Framed-mind 2, man’s or woman’s identification with nature is a strongly-felt reality in Framed-mind 2. And there we must look for the answers regarding man’s or woman’s relationship with nature. There in Frame-mind 2 the nature of the psyche appears quite clearly, so that its sweeps and rhythms can be understood. The manifestations of physical energy follow emotional rhythms that cannot be ascertained with gadgets or instruments, however fine.

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Why is one killed and not another? Why does an earthquake disrupt an entire area? What is the relationship between the individual and such mass events of nature?

Before we can begin to consider such questions, we must take another look at our world, and ascertain its source, for surely its source and nature’s are the same. We make some distinctions between events and our interpretation of them.

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It certainly seems that our world is concrete, factual, definite, and that its daily life rests upon known events and facts. We make a clear distinction between fact and fantasy. We take it for granted as a rule that our current knowledge as a people rests upon scientific data, at least, that are unassailable. Certainly technological development appears to have been built most securely upon a body of concrete ideas.

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience — yet all that we know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framed-mind 2. In a manner of speaking our factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, an imagination, from which all of our detailed paraphernalia emerge. What then is myth, and what do I mean by the term?

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Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality. That representation is then used as a model upon which our civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens we interpret the private events of our life in their historical context. For instance, while some might dismiss the story of primitive men and women separating from each other and living individually due to their emotional conflicts as a myth, they forget that this mere myth is something that might have laid the foundation for divorces in the modern world. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be professionals like a family lawyer bradford or institutions like courts or terms like “divorce” in the civilized world.

Remember that when we accept myths, we call them facts, or course, for they become so a part of our lives, of societies and our professions, that their basis seems self-apparent. Myths are vast psychic dramas, more truthful than facts. They provide an ever-enduring theater of reality. It must be clearly understood, then, that myths imply the nature of psychic events whose enduring reality exists in Framed-mind 2, and forms the patterns that are then interpreted in our world.

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If someone is caught in a natural disaster, the following questions might be asked: “Am I being punished by God, and for what reason? Is the disaster the result of God’s vengeance?” A scientist might ask instead: “With better technology and information, could we somehow have predicted the disaster, and saved many lives?” He or she might try to dissociate himself or herself from emotion, and to see the disaster simply as the result of a non personal nature that did not know or care what lay in its path.

In all cases, however, such situations instantly bring to mind questions of man’s or woman’s reality and course, his or her connections with God, his or her planet, and the universe. He interprets those questions according to his or her own beliefs.

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Myths are natural phenomena, rising from the psyche of man or woman as surely as giant mountain ranges emerge from the physical planet. Their deeper reality exists, whoever, in Framed-mind 2 as source material for the world that we know.

In those terms, the great religions of our civilizations rise from myths that change their characters through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall. We can see mountain ranges. It would be ridiculous to ignore their reality. We see our myths somewhat less directly, yet are apparent within all of our activities, and they form the inner structures of all or our civilizations with their multitudinous parts.

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In those terms, then, Christianity and our other religions are myths, rising in response to an inner knowledge that is too vast to be clothed by facts alone. In those terms also, our science is also quite mythical in nature. This may be more difficult for some or us to perceive since it appears to work so well. Others will be willing enough to see science in its mythical characteristics, but will be most reluctant to see religion as we know it in the same light. To some extent or another, however, all of these ideas program our interpretation of events.

In this discussion, we are more or less dealing with the events of nature as we understand it. It will seem obvious to some, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s and woman’s own emotional reality. The Christian scientist is caught in between. Because we divorce ourselves from nature, we are not able to understand its manifestations. Often myths get in the way. When myths become standardized, and too literal, when we begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then we misread them entirely. When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real. Their power becomes constrained.

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Most people interpret the realities of their lives, their triumphs and failures, their health or illness, their fortune or misfortune, then, in the light of a mythical reality that is not understood as such. What is behind these myths, and what is their source of power?

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Facts are a very handy but weak brew of reality. They immediately consign certain kinds of experiences as real and others as not. The psyche, however, will not be so limited. It exists in a medium of reality, a realm of being in which all possibilities exist. It creates myths the way the ocean creates spray. Myths are originally psychic fabrications of such power and strength that whole civilizations can rise from their source. They involve symbols and know emotional validities that are then connected to the physical world, so that that world is never the same again. They cast their light over historical events because they are responsible for those events. They mix and merge the inner, unseen but felt, eternal psychic experience of man with the temporal events of his or her physical days, and form a combination that structures thoughts and beliefs from civilization to civilization. In Framed-mind 2 the interior power of nature is ever-changing. The dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears of man and woman interact in a constant motion that then forms the events of our world. That interaction includes not only man, of course, but the emotional reality of all earthly consciousnesses as well, from a microbe to a scholar, from a frog to a star. We interpret the phenomena of our world according to the mythic characteristics that we have accepted. We organize physical reality, then, through ideas validity. The physical body itself is quite capable of putting the world together in different fashions than the one that is familiar to us.

We divorce ourselves from nature and nature’s intents far more than the animals do. Nature in its stormy manifestations seems like an adversary. We must either look for reasons outside of ourselves to explain what seems to be nature’s ill intent at such times, or its utter lack of concern.

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Science often says that nature care little for the individual, only for the species, so then we must often see ourselves as victims in a larger struggle for survival, in which our own intents do not carry even the puniest sway.

Even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event.

Events do not exist in the concrete, done-and finished versions about which we have been taught, then memory must also be a different story. Remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events.

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The original happening is experienced from a different perspective on the a part of each person involved, of course, so that the event’s implications and basic meanings may differ according to the focus of each participant. That given event, in our terms happening for the first time, say, begins to “work upon” the participants. Each one brings to it his or her own background, temperament, and literally a thousand different colorations — so that the event, while shared by others, is still primarily original to each person.

The moment it occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event. The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past. Association triggers memories, of course, and organizes memory events. It also helps color and form such events.

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We are used to a time structure, so that we remember something that happened at a particular time in the past. Usually we can place events in that fashion. There are neurological pockets, so to speak, so that biologically the body can place events as it perceives activity. Those neurological pulses are geared to the biological world we know.

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast. Overall, this is necessary so that immediate body response can be focused in the time period we recognize. Other life memories are carried along, so to speak, beneath those other pulses — never, in certain terms, coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming, say, the undercurrents upon which the memories of our current life ride.

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When such other-life memories do come to the surface, they are of course colored by it, and their rhythm is not synchronized. They are not tied into our nervous system as precisely as our regular memories. Our present gains its feelings of depth because of our past as we understand it. In certain terms, however, the future represents, say, another kind of depth that belongs to events. A root goes out in all directions. Events do also. But the roots of events go through our past, present, and future.

Often by purposefully trying to slow down our thought processes, or playfully trying to speed them up, we can become aware of memories from other lives — past or future. To some extent we allow other neurological impulses to make themselves known. There may often be a feeling of vagueness, because we have no ready-made scheme of time or place with which to structure such memories. Such exercises also involve us with the facts of the events of our own life, for we automatically are following probabilities from the point of our own focus.

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It would be most difficult to operate within our sphere of reality without the pretension of concrete, finished events. We form our past lives now in this life as surely as we form our future ones now also.

Simultaneously, each of our past and future selves dwell in their own way now, and for them the last sentence also applies. It is theoretically possible to understand much of this through an examination-in-depth of the events of our own life. Throwing away many taken-for-granted concepts, we can pick a memory. But try not to structure it — a most difficult task — for such structuring is by now almost automatic.

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The memory, left alone, not structured, will shimmer, shake, take other forms, and transform itself before our [mental] eyes, so that its shape will seem like a psychological kaleidoscope through whose focus the other events of our life will also shimmer and change. Such a memory exercise can also serve to bring in other-life memories. Edges, corners, and reflections will appear, however, perhaps superimposed upon memories that we recognize as belonging to this life.

Our memories serve to organize our experience and again, follow recognized neurological sequences. Other-life memories from the future and past often bounce off of these with a motion too quick for us to follow.

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In a quiet moment, off guard, we might remember an event from this life, but there may be a strange feeling to it, as if something about it, some sensation, does not fit into the time slot in which the event belongs. In such cases that [present-life] memory is often tinged by another, so that a future or past life memory shreds it cast upon the recalled event. There is a floating quality about one portion of the memory.

This happens more often than is recognized, because usually we simply discount the feeling of strangeness, and drop the part of the memory that does not fit. Such instances involve definite bleed-throughs, however. By being alert and catching such feelings, we can learn to use the floating part of the otherwise-recognizable memory as a focus. Through association that focus can then trigger further past or future recall. Clues also appear in the dreaming state, with greater frequency, because then we are already accustomed to that kind of floating sensation in which events can seem to happen in their own relatively independent context.

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Dreams in which past and present are both involved are an example; also dreams in which the future and the past merge, and dreams in which time seems to be a changing ingredient.

In certain terms the past , present, and future [of our present life] are all compressed in any given moment of our experience.

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Any such moment is therefore a gateway into all of our existence. The events that we recognize as happening now are simply specific and objective, but the most minute elements in any given moment’s experience is also symbolic of other events and other times. Each moment is then like a mosaic, only in our current life history we follow but one color or pattern, and ignore the others. As I have mentions [in other blogs], we can indeed change the present to some extent by purposefully altering a memory event. That kind of synthesis can be used in many instances with many people.

Such an exercise is not some theoretical, esoteric, impractical method, but a very precise, volatile, and dynamic way of helping the present self by calming the fears of a past self. That past self is not hypothetical, either, but still exists, capable of being reached and of changing its reactions. We do not need a time machine to alter the past or future.

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Such a technique is highly valuable. Not only are memories not “dead,” they are themselves ever-changing. Many alter themselves almost completely without our notice. While the bare facts more or less the same, the entire meaning and interpretation of each version differs so drastically that those differences far out-weigh the similarities.

In most cases, however, people are not aware that memory changes in such a fashion, or that the events they think they recall are so different.

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The point is that past events grow. They are not finished. With that in mind, we can see that future lives are very difficult to explain from within our framework. A completed life in our terms is no more completed or done than any event. There is simply a cutoff point in our focus our framework, but it is as artificial as, basically, perspective is applied to painting.

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It is not that the inner self is not aware of all of this, but it has already chosen a framework, or a given frame of existence, that emphasizes certain kinds of experiences over others.

 

Man’s and Woman’s physical relationship with nature

Environmental questions are being raised about human’s effects upon the world in which he or she lives. There is, however, an inner environment that connects all consciousnesses that dwell upon our planet, in whatever form. This mental or psychic — or in any case nonphysical — environment is ever in a state of flux and motion. That activity provides us with all exterior phenomena.

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Our sense perception, physically speaking, is a result of behavior on the part of organs that seem to us to have no reality outside on their relationship with us. Those organs are themselves composed of atoms and molecules with their own consciousnesses. They have, then, their own states of sensation and cognition. They work for us, allowing us to perceive physical reality.

Our ears certainly seem to be permanent appendages, and do our eyes. We say: “My eyes are blue,” or “My eyes are small.” The physical matter of those sense organs changes constantly, however, with us none the wiser. While our body appears quite dependable, solid, [and] steady, we are not aware of the constant interchanges that occur between it and the physical environment. It does not bother us one whit that the physical substance of our body is made up of completely different atoms and molecules than it was composed of seven years ago, [say], or that our familiar hands are actually innocent of any smallest smidgen of matter that composed them [even in recent times past].

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We perceive our body as solid. The very senses that make such a deduction are the result of the behavior of atoms and molecules literally coming together to form the organs, filling a pattern of flesh. All other objects that we perceive are formed in their own way in the same fashion.

The physical world that we recognize is made up of invisible patterns. These patterns are “plastic,” in that while they exist, their final form is a matter or probabilities directed by consciousness. Our senses perceive these patterns in their own ways. The patterns themselves can be “activated” in innumerable fashions. There is something out there to observe.

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Our sense apparatus determines what form that something will take, however. The mass world rises up before our eyes, but our eyes are part of that mass world. We cannot see our thoughts, so we do not realize that they have shape and form, even as, say, clouds do. There are currents of thoughts as there are currents of air, and the mental patterns of man’s and women’s feelings and thoughts rise up like flames from a fire, or steam from hot water, to fall like ashes or like rain.

All elements of the interior invisible environment work together, and they form the temporal weather patterns that are exteriorized mental states, presenting us locally and en masse, then with a physical version of man’s emotional states.

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The physical planet is obviously also ever-changing while it is operational or realistically or pragmatically relatively stable. The physical matter of the planet is also composed of literally infinite hoarders of consciousnesses — each experiencing its own reality while adding to the overall cooperative venture.

Natural disasters represent an understandably prejudiced concept, in which the vast creative and rejuvenating elements important to planetary life, and therefore to humankind, are ignored. The stability of the planet rests upon such changes and alterations, even as the body’s stability is dependent upon, say, the birth and death of the cells.

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It is quite obvious that people must die — not only because we would overpopulate our world into extinction but because the nature of consciousness requires new experience, challenge, and accomplishment. This is everywhere apparent in nature itself. If there were no death, we would have to invent it — for the context of the self-hood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone.

The sculptor’s creation is pragmatically realistic, in that it exists as an object, and can be quite legitimately perceived as can our world. The sculptor’s statue, however, comes from the inner environment, the patterns of probabilities. These patterns are not them selves inactive. They are possessed by the desire to be-actualized. Behind all realities there are mental states. These always seek form, though again there are other forms than those we recognize.

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A chair is a chair for our purposes. As you read this blog you most probably lounge on a chair or couch or bench — all quite sturdy and real. The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though we do not grant them the quality of life. When children play ring-around-the-rosy, they form living circles in the air. In the game they enjoy the motion of their bodies, but they do not identify with those swirling circles. The atoms and molecules that make up a chair play a different kind of ring-around-the-rosy, and are involved in constant motion, forming a certain pattern that we perceive as a chair.

The difference in motion are so divergent that to us the chair, like our body, appears permanent. The atoms and molecules, like the children, enjoy their motion — solidly sketched in space from our perspective, however, with no “idea” that we consider that motion a chair, or so use it.

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We perceive the atoms’ activity in that fashion. [Nevertheless] the agreement takes place at mental levels, and is never completely “set,” though it appears to be. No one perceives the same chair [all the time], though perhaps a given chair will seem to be “the same one” seen from different angles.

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The dance of the atoms and molecules is continuous in our area. In greater terms, any given chair is never the same chair. All of this must be taken into consideration when we discuss mass events.

Each of us possesses a unique, original stance in space and time, regardless of time’s relative existence.

That reality contributes to the experience of others. Only when we operate from our own stance can we help others to the best of our ability. To anticipate danger, or to imaginatively take on the troubles of others robs us of the very energy with which we could help them. I am not saying, therefore, to turn our eyes from the unfortunate conditions of the world. Practical help is needed in all areas of the human life. Yet it is far better, and more practical ultimately, to concentrate upon the beneficial elements of civilization — far better to organize our thoughts in areas of accomplishment than to make lists of man’s or woman’s deficiencies and lacks.

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Such a practice leads to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, in which effective action seems impossible. Life possesses an exuberance. If this is cherished, nurtured, encouraged, then additional energy is generated that is not needed for the purposes of daily private life — a superabundance, that can be effectively directed in those areas of the world where help is most needed.

The strength, vitality, and effectiveness of thought is seldom considered. Though, we may say will not stop war — yet what do we think started such a war? Throughout history the downtrodden have often risen into power, using force, rebelling against their oppressors; and yet, learning little from that experience, they turn and become the new elite, the new power-holders. Their physical conditions may be completely changed, Now theirs, the offices of government, the wealth. Gone are the conditions that, it would seem, caused the uprising. Yet in retaliation they strike out, forming a new class of downtrodden who must in their turn rise and retaliate.

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Despite all appearances, conditions of an exterior nature do not cause wars, or poverty, or disease, or any of the unfortunate circumstances apparent in the world. Our beliefs form our reality. Our thoughts generate practical experience. When these change, conditions will change. To add our own energy, focus, and concentration of dire circumstances in other portions of the world does not help, but adds to, such situations.

To close our eyes to them in an ignorant fashion, to wash our hands of them, so to speak, is equally shortsighted. To pretend such situations do not exist, out of fear of them, will only bring the feared reality closer. It is far better to situate oneself firmly in our own reality, acknowledge it as our own, encourage our strength and creativity, and from that vantage point view those areas of the world or of our own society that need constructive help. Purposefully in our own life, in our daily dialogues with others, in our relationships through our groups or clubs, reinforce as well as we can the strength and abilities of others.

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That reinforcement will add to the personal power of all other individuals with whom those people come in contact. Find the beliefs responsible for the unfortunate conditions. Each individual should be able to assess his or her own reality realistically. There would be no need to arm a nation in advance against another nation’s anticipated — but imaginary — attack.

Personal grudges would not build up, so that men or women so fear further hurts that they attempt to hide from life or relationships, or shy away from contact with others. It is not virtuous to count our failings. Self-conscious righteousness can be a very narrow road. If each of us understood and perceived the graceful integrity of our own individuality, just as we try to perceive the beauty of all other natural creatures, then we would allow our own creativity greater reign. There is order in all elements of nature, and we are part of it.

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The greater sweep of the seasons represents the reaches of our soul. We will not attain spirituality by turning our eyes away from nature, or by trying to disentangle oneself from it. We will not “glimpse eternal life” by attempting to deny the life that we have now — for that life is our own unique path, and provides its own clues for us to follow.

All That Is vibrates with desire. The denial of desire will bring us only listlessness. Those who deny desire are the most smitten by it. Each of our lives are miniature and yet gigantic episodes, mortal and immortal at once, providing experiences that we form meaningfully, opening up dimensions of reality available to no one else, for no one can view existence from our standpoint. No one can be you but you. There are communications at other levels, but our experience of existence is completely original, to be treasured.

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No one from any psychological threshold, however vast, can write a book that defines the psyche, but only present hints and clues, words and symbols. The words and ideas stand for inner realities — that is, they are like piano keys striking other chords; chords that, hopefully, will be activated within the psyche of each person.

Each or us is couched now in the natural world, and world is couched in a reality from which nature emerges. The psyche’s roots are secure, nourishing it like a tree from the ground of being. The source of the psyche’s strength is within each individual, the invisible fabric of the person’s existence.

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Nature is luxurious and abundant in its expressions. The greater reality from which nature springs is evens more abundant, and within that multidimensional experience no individual is ignored, forgotten, dismissed, lost, or forsaken. A tree does not have to ask for nourishment for the ground or the sun, and so everything that we need is available to us in our practical experience. If we believe we are not worthy of nourishment, if we believe that life itself is dangerous, then our own beliefs make it impossible for us to fully utilize that available help. In large measure, since we are still alive, we are of course nourished. We cannot close out the vitality of our own being easily, and the vitality “squandered” on deeper bouts of depression is often greater than the energy used in creative pursuits. We are a portion of All That Is; therefore the universe leans in our direction. It gives. It rings with vitality. Then forsake beliefs that tell us otherwise. Seek within oneself — each of us — those feelings of exuberance that we have, even if they are only occasional, and encourage those events or thoughts that bring them about.

We cannot find our psyche by thinking of it as a separate thing, like a fine jewel in an eternal closet. We can only experience its strength and vitality by exploring the subjective reality that is our own, for it will lead us unerringly to that greater source of being that transcends both space and time.

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The overall stance of the species is largely maintained by the waking-sleeping patterns. In such a fashion, one large portion of the species focuses in physical reality while the other large portion holds a secure foothold in inner reality.

In inner reality we are working on the interior patterns that will form the next day’s realities, and providing probable previews of the future events. Waking and sleeping reality is therefore balanced in the world mind — not the world brain.

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However, the sleeping portion of the species represents the brain’s unconscious activities in the body — particularly when we think of the motion of all of the species’ action en masse in a given day. Those conscious motions have an unconscious basis. If we think of a mass world brain — one entity — then it must wake and sleep in patterns. If we think of mass daily action as performed by one gigantic being, then all of those conscious actions have unconscious counterparts, and a great intercommunication of an inner nervous system must take place.

Part of such brain would have to be awake all of the time, and part engaged in unconscious activity. This is what happens.

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Diverse cultures are thus able to communicate as the cultural knowledge of various parts of the world is given to the sleeping portion of the entire organism. When they sleep, the waking nations add the day’s events to the world memory, and work out future probabilities.

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.

It is often not enough, that deep emotional fears simply be realized once or twice.

Deep emotional fears must be encountered more or less directly. Otherwise the old habits allow such fears to be buried again.

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Fear’s released, give the solution to a deep emotional equation. For example, the realization emotionally that life is not given by the parent, but through the parent — by LIFE itself, or All That Is, and “with no strings attached.”

In dreams we can put this together. We cannot logically, mathematically explain such emotional reality.

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On some occasions long-term illnesses, for instance, are resolved suddenly through a dream. However, in most cases dreams prevent such chronic illnesses, providing through small therapeutics a constant series of minor but important personal revelations.

That is, dreams are the best preventative medicine. Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding. Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind. As the body handles many physical manipulations without our own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of our own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which we are not aware.

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We could not handle anything like complete dream recall. We are not consciously capable of dealing with the psychological depths and riches that activity reveals. For one thing, our concepts of time, realistically or practically speaking, as utilized, would become more difficult to maintain in normal life. This does not mean that far greater dream recall than we have is not to our advantage, because it certainly is. I merely want to explain why so many dreams are not recalled.

While the large proportion remain relatively hidden, however, the average person often meets with dream fragments just below the normal threshold of consciousness — not recognizing them as what they are — experiencing instead the impulse to do this or that on a given day; to eat this or that, or to refrain from something else. An easy enough example is the case where an individual with no memory [of such a dream] decides to cancel a plane trip on a given day, and later discovers that the plane crashed. The impulse to cancel may or may not seem to have an acceptable, rational explanation; that is, for no seeming reason, the individual may simply, impulsively, feel a premonition. On the other hand the impulse might appear as a normal, logical change of plan.

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We are taking it for granted that a forgotten dream stated the probable catastrophe. This information was unconsciously processed, the probability considered and rejected: Psychologically or physically, the person was not ready to die. Others with the same knowledge found that death was the accepted probability. This does not mean that any of those people could bear consciously knowing their own decisions — or could board that plane with the conscious consequences in mind.

Nor is such an inner decision forced upon the conscious personality, for in all such instances, the conscious personality has at various times come close to accepting the idea of death at the particular time in life.

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This does not mean that those people are committing suicide in the same way that a person does who takes his or her life — but the in a unique psychological manipulation they no longer hold the same claim to life as they had before. They “throw their lives to the Fates,” so to speak, saying not as they did before: “I will live,” but: “I will live or die as the Fates decide.”

They may use other terms than Fate, of course, but the vital, personal, direct, affirmative intent to live is not there. They are headed for another reality, and ready for it.

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The conscious mind, however, can only hold so much. Life as we know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms. The sweet parcel of physical existence, exists as much by merit of what it does not include as it does by merit of our experience. In important ways our dreams make our life possible by ordering our psychological life automatically, as our physical body is ordered automatically for us. We can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree. But we cannot become completely aware of our dreams in their entirety, and maintain our normal physical stance.

As a civilization we fail to reap dreams’ greater benefit, and the conscious mind is able to handle much more dream recall that we allow. Such training would add immeasurably to the dimensions of our life. Dreams educate us even in spatial relationships, and are far more related to the organism’s stance in the environment than is realized. The child learns spatial relationships in dreams.

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The mother did not give life. The life comes from All That IS, from the spirit of life itself, and is freely given — to be taken away by no one, or threatened by no one or no force, until that life fulfills its own purposes and decides to travel on.

Life is expression. It comes to be out of the force of itself, and no force stands against it or threatens it. Death in our terms certainly seems an end, but it is instead a translation of life into another form.

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There are verbal difficulties having to do with the definition of life. It appears that there is living matter and non-living matter, leading to such questions as: “How does non-living matter become living?”

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.