Category Archives: Physical Life

The body reacts to information about the environment.

Information which we are not consciously concerned. That same information is highly important to the body’s integrity, however, and therefore to our own mental stance.

On cellular levels the body has a picture not only of its own present condition, but of all those aspects of the physical environment that affect its own condition. In its own codified fashion it is not only aware of local weather conditions, for example, but of all those world patterns of weather upon which the local area is dependent. It then prepares itself ahead of time to meet whatever challenges of adjustment will be necessary. It weighs probabilities; it reacts to pressures of various kinds.

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We are aware of pressure through touch, but in another version of that sense entirely, the cells react to air pressure. The body knows to the most precise degree the measurements involving radiation of all kinds. At one level, the body itself has a picture of reality of its own, upon which our conscious reality must be based — and yet the body’s terms of recognition or knowledge exist in terms so alien to our conscious ones as to be incomprehensible. Our conscious order, therefore, rides upon this greater circular kind of knowledge.

Generally speaking, the psyche has the same kind of instant overall comprehension of psychological events and environments as our body has of physical ones. It is then aware of our overall psychological climate; locally, as it involves us personally, and in world terms.

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Our actions take place with such seeming smoothness that we do not realize the order involved. A volcanic eruption in one corner of the world will ultimately affect the entire earth in varying degrees. An emotional eruption will do the same thing on another level, altering the local area primarily but also sending out its ripples into the mass psychological environment. The psyche’s picture of reality, then, would be equally incomprehensible to the conscious mind because of the intense focus upon singularity that our usual consciousness requires.

Our dreams often give us glimpses, however, of the psyche’s picture of reality in that regard.

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We become aware of probabilities, as actions sometimes that seem to have no connection with our own, but which are still related to them in that greater scheme of interaction that ordinarily we do not comprehend.

When we grow from a baby to an adult we do not just grow tall: we grow all about oneself, adding weight and thickness as well. To some extent events “grow” in the same fashion, and from the inside out, as we do. In a dream we are closer to those stages in which events are born. In our terms they emerge from the future and from the past, and are given vitality because of creative tension that exists between what we think of as our birth and our death. We make sentences out of alphabet of our language. We speak these or write them, and use them to communicate. Events can be considered in the same fashion, as psychological sentences put together from the alphabet of the senses — experience sentences that are lived instead of written, formed into perceived history instead of just being penned, for example, into a book about history.

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Our language to some extent programs our experience. There is a language of the senses, however, that gives us biological perception, experience, and communication. It forms the nature of the events that we can perceive. It puts experience together so that it is physically felt. All of our written or verbal languages have to be based upon this biological “alphabet.” There is far greater leeway here than there is in any of our spoken or written languages.

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I use the word “cord” to express the source out of which such languages spring. There are many correlations of course between our language and our body. Our spoken language is dependent upon our breath, and even written language is dependent upon the rapidity with which messages can leap the nerve endings. Biological cords then must be the source for physical languages, but the cords themselves arise from the psyche’s greater knowledge as it forms the physical mechanism to begin with.

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Dreams are a language of the psyche, in which man’s and woman’s nature merges in time and out of it. Man and woman have sense experiences. He/she runs, though he or she lies in bed. He/she shouts though no word is spoken. He/she still has the language of the flesh, and yet that language is only opaquely connected with the body’s mechanisms. He/she deals with events, yet they do not happen in his or her bedroom, or necessarily in any place that he or she can find upon awakening.

Daily language deals with separations, divisions, and distinctions

To some extent our language organizes our feelings and emotions. The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.

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In daily language, objects have certain names. Obviously the names are not the objects, but symbols for them. Even these symbols, however, divide us as the perceiver from the rest of the world, which becomes objectified. We can ourselves understand far more about the nature of the psyche, for example, than we think we can. To do this, however, we must leave our daily language behind at least momentarily, and pay attention to our own feelings and imagination. Our language tells us that certain things are true, or facts, and that certain things are not. Many of our most vivid and moving feelings do not fit the facts of our language, so we disregard them.

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These emotional experiences, however, often express the language of the psyche. It is not that an understanding of our psyche is beyond us: It is usually that we try to understand or experience it in one of the most difficult ways — Through the use of daily language.

The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche. For this reason it often gives experiences that conflict with the basic assumptions upon which daily language is based. Therefore the imagination is often considered suspect.

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We might stand alone in our doorway, or in a field — or even on a street, surrounded by many people in a large city — look upward, suddenly struck by the great sweeping clouds above, and feel oneself a part of them. We might momentarily experience a great yearning or feel our own emotions suddenly filled with that same moving majesty, so that for an instant we and the sky seem to be one.

Mundane language tells us, as we think with its patterns, that our imagination is running away with us, for obviously we are one thing and the sky is another. Us and the sky do not equate — or as friend Spock would say: “It is not logical.” The feeling swiftly fades after bemusing us briefly. We might be spiritually refreshed, yet as a rule we would not consider the feeling to be a statement of any legitimate reality, or a representation of our psyche’s existence.

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The emotions and the imagination, however, give us our closest contact with other portions of our own reality. They also liberate our intellect so that its powers are not limited by concepts it has been taught are true. Instead, such concepts are relatively true — operationally true. For example, the example, the physical laws that we are familiar with operate where we are. They are true, relatively speaking. In those terms we are one person physically objectified, staring upward in the scene just mentioned at an objectified sky. We weigh so many pounds, tilt our head at such-and-such an angle to peer upward at the skyscape, and physically speaking, we can be categorized.

In those terms the clouds could be physically measured, and shown to be so far above us — composed of, say, winds of a certain velocity, ready to pour down a precise amount of rain or whatever. Physically speaking then, obviously, we are separate from the clouds, and so in those terms our momentary experience of uniting with them would seem to be a lie — at least not factual, or “the product of our imagination.”

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Instead, such an event is a direct expression of the psyche’s knowledge. It senses its quite legitimate identification with nature, exercises its mobility, and feel its own emotional power leap. Our emotions in such a case would be momentarily magnified — raised, say, to a higher power. There are multitudinous such examples that could be given, as in each day our psyche presents evidence of its own greater being — evidence that we are taught to overlook, or to dismiss because it is factual.

What is imaginary is not true: We are taught this as children. The imagination, however, brings us into connection with a different kind of truth, or a different framework in which experience can be legitimately perceived. The larger truths of the psyche exist in that dimension.

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From it we choose physical facts. Thoughts are real. Only some thoughts turn into physical actions, of course. Despite distorted versions of that last statement, however, there is still obviously a distant difference, say, between the though of adultery and its physical expression.

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We cannot treat thoughts and imagination in such a literal manner, nor in a large respect should we try to “guard our thoughts” as if they were herds of animals that we wanted to keep purely bred. Our thoughts do form our reality. If we do not fear them, however, they create their own balances. The psyche dwells in a reality so different from the world we usually recognize that there good and evil, as we think of them, are also seen to be as operationally or relatively true as the difference between the perceiver and the object perceived.

The physical world implies the existence of God

God’s existence also implies the existence of a physical world.

This statement implies the unstated, and the reverse also applies.

To deny the validity or importance of the individual is, therefore also to deny the importance or validity of God, for the two exist one within the other, and we cannot separate them.

From one end of reality we shout: “Where is God?” and from the other end the answer comes: “I am Me.” From the other end of reality, God goes shouting: “Who am I?” and finds himself in us. We are therefore a part of the source, and so is everything else manifest. Because God is, we are. Because we are, God is.

On a conscious level certainly we are not all that God is, for that is the unstated, un-manifest portion of oneself. Our being rides upon that unstated reality, as a letter of the alphabet rides upon the inner organizations that are implied by its existence. In those terms our unstated portions “reach backwards to Source called God,” as various languages can be traced back to their source. Master language can be compared to the historic gods. Each person alive is a part of the living God, supported in life by the magnificent power of nature, which is God, translated into the elements of the earth and the universe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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