Category Archives: Physical Life

When we are safely ensconced in a comfortable room…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The sleeping and waking portions of life on earth.

A Tiger, following its nature is not evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origin of the “interior” universe from which the exterior one ever emerges

Here we must part company with treasured objectivity, and enter instead a mental domain, in which it is seen that contradictions are not errors; an inner domain, in which it is seen that contradictions at one level, for at another level they are seen to be no contradictions at all.

In science as it stands, it is necessary that self-contradictions do not arise. If a hypothesis is “proven true,” then it cannot be proven false — or, of course, it was never true to begin with.

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In those terms, therefore, the universe either had “a Creator,” or it had none; or it came into being as stated in the Big Bang theory, and is either constantly expanding or it is not. Evolution exists or it does not. As a rule such theories are proven “true’ by the simple process of excluding anything else that seems contradictory, and so generally our scientific theories carry the weight of strong validity within their own frameworks.

In those frameworks we have made certain classifications that now appear quite obvious. Common sense upholds them, and it seems impossible to consider reality otherwise. Yet by their nature such categories structure our experience of reality itself to such an extent that any alternate ways of perceiving life seem not only untrustworthy, but completely impossible.

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Our classifications of various species appear to us as the only logical kinds of divisions that could be made among living things. Quite the contrary is the case, however. That particular overall method of separation leads to such questions as: Which species came first, and which came later, and how did the various species merge — one from the other? Those questions are further brought about by our time classifications, without which they would be meaningless.

Our classifications in such respects set up exterior divisions. Now these serve as quite handy reference points, but basically speaking they in no way affect the natural experience of those various living creatures that we refer to as “other species.”

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Our specializations work as long as we stay within the framework, though then we must wrestle with the questions that such divisions automatically entail. It is perhaps difficult for us to realize that these are written and verbalized categories that in no real manner tell us anything about the actual experience of other creatures — but only note habits, tendencies, and separations of the most exterior nature.

If our purpose is to comprehend what other living creatures perceive, then the methods we are using are at the best short-sighted, and at the worst they completely defeat our purpose. For example: No matter what information or data we receive as the result of animal experimentation or dissection for scientific purposes, and no matter how valuable the results appear to be, the consequences of such methods are so distorted that we comprehend less of life than we did before.

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Our present methods will simply bring us pat, manufactured results and answers. They will satisfy neither the intellect nor the soul. Since our universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of our own existence, we must look where we have not before — into reality of our own minds and emotions. We must look to the natural universe that we know. We must look with our intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about us, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

We must study the quality of life, dare to follow the patterns of our own thoughts and emotions, and to ride that mobility, for in that mobility there are hints of the origin of the universe and of the psyche. The poet’s view of the universe and of nature is more scientific, then, than the scientist’s, for more of nature is comprehended.

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The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet, understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classifications of all the world’s flowers. Information is not necessarily knowledge or comprehension.

Thoughts spring into out mind as the objective universe swims into reality — that is, in the same fashion. Diagramming sentences tells us little about the spoken language, and nothing about those miraculous physical and mental performances that allow us to speak — an so diagramming the species of the world is, in the same way, quite divorced from any true understanding.

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The subjective feeling of our being, our intimate experience from moment-to-moment — these possess the same mysterious quality that it seems to us the universe possesses. We are mortal, and everywhere encounter evidence of that mortality, and yet within its framework our feelings and thoughts have a reality to us personally that transcends all such classifications. We know that physically we will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somehow eternal.

Through such feelings the psyche breaks through all misconceptions, hinting at the nature of self and of the universe, and at that level there are no contradictions. There is no beginning or end to the psyche, either. We may say: “Granted” yet persist, saying: “In our terms, however, when did the world begin, and in what manner?” Yet the very attempt to place such an origin in time makes almost any answer distorted.

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The truth is that the answers lie in our own experience. They are implied in our own spontaneous behavior — that is, in the wondrous activity of our bodies and minds.

We walk well without having at our fingertips any conscious knowledge of the inner mechanism’s activity. We may have been told, or we may have read about the body’s anatomy, and the interaction of its parts. Yet whether or not we have such information, we walk quite well. Such data therefore do not help our walking performance any.

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For that matter, an athlete may have a great zest for motion and an impatience with reading, caring not what within the body makes it move as long as its performance is superb — within an invalid with great book knowledge about all of the body’s parts is quite unable to physically perform in a normal manner.

Our body knows how to walk. The knowledge is built-in and acted upon. The body knows how to heal itself, how to use its nourishment, how to replace its tissues, yet in our terms the body itself has no access to the kind of information the mind possesses. Being so ignorant, how does it perform so well?

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If it were scientifically inclined, the body would know that such spontaneous performance was impossible, for science cannot explain the reality of life itself in its present form, much less its origins.

Consciousness within the body knows that its existence is within the body’s context, and apart from it at the same time. In ordinary life during the day consciousness often takes a recess, so to speak — it daydreams, or otherwise experiences itself as somewhat apart from the body’s reality. At night, in sleep, the self’s consciousness takes longer, freer recesses from physical reality, and does this as spontaneously as the body itself walks. These experiences are not hypothetical. They happen to each person. On such occasions, each person is to some extent aware of a kind of comprehension that is not dependent upon the accumulation of data, but of a deeper kind if experience and direct encounter with the reality from which the world emerges.

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This is the kind of wordless knowledge the body possesses, that brings forth our physical motion and results in the spectacular preciseness of bodily response. It is, then, highly practical. In our terms, the same force that formed the world forms our subjective reality now, and is a source of the natural universe.

Exploring those realities lovingly will bring us into direct contact with inner dimensions of our being, providing intuitive understandings that are of great import.

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The motion of the universe appears in the motion of our own intimate experience, and in that seemingly most nebulous area the answers will be found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

There is no non-matter.

There is simply a point that we recognize as having the characteristics that we have ascribed to life, or living conditions — a point that meets the requirements that we have arbitrarily set.

There is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter. There is no point at which consciousness emerged. Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions we call living.

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In terms of continuity, we could say that life in the physical universe, on our planet, “began” spontaneously in a given number of species at the same time.

There were fully developed men — of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in our terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors. Species have come and gone of which we have no knowledge. There are parallel developments. That is there were “apes” who attained their own “civilizations,” for example. They used tools. They were not men-to-be, nor did they evolve into men.

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It is erroneous to say that they did not develop. Or that their progress was stunned, for it was not. Their reality explored the ramifications of animal-hood in a completely different fashion. Their development paralleled man’s and woman’s in many respects, in that they lived simultaneously upon the earth, and shared the environment.

I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man and woman did learn from them. The impact of many of my statements of the past goes unrecognized, or perhaps the words sound pat, but there are other conditions of life that we do not perceive, sometimes because our time sequences are too different. Before the smallest cell appeared, in our terms, there was the consciousness that formed the cell.

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Words do nearly forsake me, the semantic differences are so vast. If I say to you: “Life came from a dream,” such a statement sounds meaningless. Yet as our physical reality personally is largely dependent upon our dreaming state, and impossible without it, so in the same way the first cell was physically materialized and actual only because of its own inner reality of consciousness.

In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination — that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in our terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as we think of it was possible — and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.

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There was no point at which consciousness was introduced, because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged. That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence. In our terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment. In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.

As hinted, there have been all kinds of species of animal-man, and man-animal, of which our sciences are not aware, and bones found thought to form, say, a man and an animal that were from the same creature. Afghanistan comes to mind, as a particularly lucrative environment.

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Our own kind of conscious mind is splendid and unique. It causes us, however, to interpret all other kinds of life according to our own specifications and experience. The complex nature of other animal consciousness escapes us completely. And when we compare our technologies, learning, logical thought, cultures and arts with us understand of animal experience, there seems no doubt that we are superior and “the Flower of Evolution” — that all other kinds of life are topped by our existence.

We are closed to the intricate, voluptuous, sensuous, social experience of the animals, or even of the plants — not being able to perceive that different kind of biological emotion and belonging, that rich, sensual identification with earth, and cut off from a biologically oriented culture that is everywhere part and parcel of both plant and animal life.

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We are a part of that also, but the conscious mind, with its own specifications, cannot manipulate with that kind of knowledge.

There have also been men and women — in our terms — more developed than us — in terms — for our ideas of development are highly erroneous. But topped us in technology, if that is our criterion.

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I hesitate in many instances to say what I might, because it is so easy to misinterpret meanings; but when we ask what is the purpose of consciousness we take it for granted there must be one purpose — where the greater truth and creativity must be that consciousness itself cannot be aware of all of its own purposes, but ever discovers its own nature through its own manifestations.

To those who want easy answers, this is no answer. There is, I know, in heroic terms a love, a knowledge, a compassion, a creativity that can assigned to All That Is, which is within each creature. I know that each smallest “particle” of consciousness can never be broken down, and that each contains an infinite capacity for creativity and development — and that each is innately blessed.

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There is a design and a designer, but they are so combined, the one within and the one without, that it is impossible to separate them. The Creator is also within its creations, and the creations themselves are gifted with creativity.

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.

Our memories, feelings, and emotions are connected to the body

It is as if the experience of our life were captured on a film. In this case the film would be the body tissue, the brain’s tissue. The experiences themselves, however, would exist independently of the film, which in any case could not capture their entirely.

In a manner of speaking the activity of our brain adjusts the speed with which we, as a physical creature, perceive life’s events. Theoretically, those events could be slowed down or run at a quicker pace. Again in a manner of speaking, the sound, vision, dimensional solidarity and so forth are “Dubbed in. ” The picture runs at the same speed, more or less. The physical senses chime in together to give us a dramatic sensual chorus, each “voice” keeping perfect time with all the other sensual patterns so that as a rule there is harmony and a sense of continuity, with no embarrassing lapses.

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The same applies to our thoughts, which if we bother to listen seem to come smoothly one after another, more or less following the sequence of exterior activity. The brain like the movie screen gives us a physical picture, in living stereo, of inner activities that nowhere themselves physically appear.

Our brain gives us a handy and quite necessary reference system with which to conduct corporal life. It puts together for us in their “proper” sequences events that could be experienced in many other ways, using other kinds of organization. The brain, of course, and other portions of the body, tune into our planet and connect us with numberless time sequences — molecular, cellular, and so forth — so that they are synchronized with the world’s events.

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The brain organizes activity and translates events, but it does not initiate them. Events have an electromagnetic reality that is then projected onto the brain for physical activation. Or instruments only pick up certain levels of the brain’s activity. They do not perceive the mind’s activity at all, except as it is imprinted onto the brain.

Even dreams are so imprinted. When one portion or one half of the brain is activated, for example, the corresponding portion of the other half is also activated, but at levels scientists do not perceive. It is ridiculous to call one side or the other of the brain dominant, for the full richness of the entire earth experience requires utilization of both halves, as does dreaming.

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In dreaming, however, the full sense-picture usually projected by the brain, and reinforced by bodily action, is not necessary. Those dream experiences often seem out of joint or out of focus in morning’s hindsight, or in retrospect, simply because they occur with a complexity that the brain could not handle in ordinary waking terms.

The body obviously must react in our official present; hence the brain neatly keeps its physical time sequences with spaced neural responses. The entire package of physical reality is dependent upon the senses’ data being timed — synchronized — giving the body an opportunity for precise action. In dreams the senses are not so restrained. Events from past, present, and future can be safely experienced, as can events that would be termed probable from our usual viewpoint, since the body, again, is not required to act upon them.

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Because of the brain’s necessary specifications, large portions of our own greater reality cannot appear through its auspices. The brain might consider such extracurricular activity as background noise or clutter that it could not decipher. It is the mind, then, as the brain’s non-physical counterpart, that decides what data will activate the brain in that regard. The so-called ancient portions of the brain among them the brainstem — limbic system contain “the mind’s memories.” Generally speaking, this means important data to which, however, no conscious attention need be given.

None could be given, because the information deals with time scales that the more “sophisticated” portions of the brain can no longer handle.

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The knowledge of the body’s own biological probabilities takes place at those ancient levels, and at those levels there is activity that results in a cellular communication existing between all species. The brain has built-in powers of adaptation to an amazing degree, so that innately one portion can take over for any other portion, and perform its activities as well as its own. Beliefs in what is possible and not possible often dull that facility, however. While the neural connections are specific, and while learned biological behavior dominates basically, the portions of the brain are innately inter-changeable, for they are directed by the mind’s action.

This is most difficult to explain, but the capacity for full conscious life is inherent in each portion of the body itself. Otherwise, in fact, it’s smooth synchronically would be impossible. The brain has abilities we do not use consciously because our beliefs prevent us from initiating the proper neural habits. Certain portions of the brain seem dominant only because of those neural habits that are adopted in any given civilization or time. But other cultures in our past have experienced reality quite differently as a result of encouraging different neural patterns, and putting experience together through other focuses.

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Dreaming, for example, can be “brought into focus” in a far sharper fashion, so that at least some of those experiences can be consciously utilized. When this happens, we are consciously taking advantage of experience that is physically and logically extra-curricular.

We are bringing into our consciousness traces of events that have not been registered in the same way that waking events are by the brain. The dream events are partially brain-recorded, but the brain separates such experience from waking events. Dreams can provide us with experience that in a manner of speaking, at least, is not encountered in time. The dream itself is recorded by the brain’s time sequences, but in the dream itself there is a duration of time “that is timeless.”

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Theoretically, certain dreams can give us a lifetime’s experience to draw upon, though the dream itself can take less than an hour in our time. In a way, dreams are the invisible thickness of our normal consciousness. They involve both portions of the brain. Many dreams do activate the brain in a ghostly fashion, sparking responses that are not practically pertinent in ordinary terms. That is, they do not require direct action but serve as anticipators of action, reminders to the brain to initiate certain actions in its future.

Dreams are so many-leveled that a full discussion requires an almost impossible verbal expertise. For while dreams do not necessitate action on the part of the whole body, and while the brain does not register the entire dream, the dream does serve to activate biological action — by releasing hormones, for example.

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There are also what I will call body dreams. No consciousness, to whatever degree, is fully manifested in matter. There is always constant communication between all portions of the body, but when the conscious mind is diverted that activity often increases. Cellular consciousness at its own level then forms a body dream. These do not involve pictures or words, but are rather like the formations of electromagnetic intent, anticipating action to be taken, and these may then serve as initiators of therapeutic dreams, in which “higher” levels of consciousness are psychologically made aware of certain conditions.

Many problems, however, are anticipated through body dreams, and conditions cleared at that level alone.

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.