Category Archives: METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES

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.

Events have nothing to do with cause and effect

This is apparent to some degree when we study dream events, for there the kind of continuity we are used to, connecting events, largely vanishes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awake While Asleep

Suggest that instead as we falling to asleep, we will come into another kind of wakefulness. Try to imagine that you are awake when you sleep. On other occasions when we go to bed, lie down and settle yourself, but as you fall asleep imagine that you are awakening the next morning. I will not tell you what to look for. The doing of this exercise is important– not the results in usual terms.

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There are different kinds of knowledge; so will this exercise bring us in contact with knowledge in another way. Done over a period of time, they will open up alternate modes of perception, so that we can view our experience from more than one standpoint. This means that our experience will itself change in quality. Sometimes when you are awake, and it is convenient, imagine that your present experience of the moment is a dream, and is highly symbolic. Then try to interpret it as such.

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Who are the people? What do they represent? If that experience were a dream, what would it mean? And into what kind of waking life would you rise in the morning?

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The qualities of consciousness cannot be elucidated. This exercise will bring us in contact with other kinds of knowing, and acquaint us with different feelings of consciousness that are not familiar. Our consciousness itself will then have a different feel as the exercise is done. Certain questions that we may have asked may be answered in such a state, but not in ways that we can anticipate, nor can we necessarily translate the answers into known terms. The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you are not alien, however. They are quite native, again, in dream states, and are always present as alternatives beneath usual awareness.

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