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The Intellect As A Cultural Artifact

The intellect is far more socially oriented than is generally understood.

Some of this, again, is difficult to explain, but in a fashion the intellect is a cultural phenomenon. It is amazing resilient, in that according to the belief structures of any given historical period, it can orient itself along the lines of those beliefs, using all of its reasoning abilities to bring such a world picture into focus, collecting data that agree, and rejecting what does not.

Obviously, the mind can use its reasoning abilities, for example, to come to the conclusion that there is a single god behind the functioning of the world, that there are many gods, that divinity is a fantasy, and that the world itself springs from no reasonable source. Like statistics, the reasoning abilities can be used to come to almost any conclusion. This is done, again, by taking into consideration within any given system of reasoning only the evidence that agrees with the system’ premises.

This flexibility allows the species great variation overall in its psychological and cultural and political and religious activities. When any system of reasoning becomes too rigid, however, there are always adjustments made that will allow other information to intrude — otherwise, of course, our belief systems would never change.

Our species shares with the other species a feeling of kinship for its kind. There is a great give-and-take of ideas. We end up, then, with a consensus, generally speaking, as to what a reasonable picture of agreed-upon reality is. Our system has frowned upon many experiences, considering them eccentric behavior in an adverse fashion, since our belief systems have so regimented behavior, and so narrowly defined sanity. The intellect, I want to stress, is socially oriented. It is peculiarly suited, of course, to react to cultural information. It wants to see the world as it is seen by the minds of others. Through that kind of action it helps form our cultural environment, the civilization of which we are justly proud.

The intellect, then, helps our species translate its own natural purposes and intents — the purposes and intents of the natural person — into their “proper” cultural context, so that those abilities the natural person possesses can benefit the civilization of its time. Those purposes and intents literally change the world. The intellect’s expectations and intents spontaneously and automatically trigger  the proper bodily mechanisms to bring about the necessary environmental interactions, and our intent as expressed through our intellect directs our experience of the world.

I am speaking about the intellect here for our discussion, but remember it is everywhere cushioned also. There are backup systems, in other words. If the intellect believes that the world is a threat to existence, then that belief will alter its intents, of course, and therefore the body’s activities. The beliefs of the intellect operate then as powerful suggestions, particularly when the intellect identifies with those beliefs, so that there is little distance between the intellect and the beliefs that it holds as true.

I am doing my best to explain the very practical aspects of the intellect’s beliefs, and their strength in drawing experience to us. At one time I had difficulty with understanding some of these ideas. Our own relationship, our private beliefs about the sort of persons we want individually for mates, brought about incalculable actions that lead finally to our meeting — yet it all happened “quite naturally,” of course. Our beliefs bring us into correspondence with the elements likely to lead to their affirmation. They draw from Framed-mind-2 all of the necessary ingredients. They elicit from other people’s behavior that is in keeping with those beliefs.

Our own attitudes, for example — and beliefs — about foreigners, people’s stupidity and lack of integrity, put us in correspondence with those same beliefs on the part of others, resulting in a translation fiasco. An entirely different kind of behavior could have been elicited from those same people. Like attracts like in that regard. Those same people, for example, all have, as we do, beliefs in people’s trustworthiness, and so forth — but under those conditions, at that time, we each — or rather us all — are in correspondence at many levels. My blogs are published. They have helped many people, and that is because we are also in correspondence as far as many of our more positive beliefs are concerned, and those outweigh the others.

We get what we concentrate upon, and our beliefs are largely responsible for those areas in which we concentrate.

There are no magical methods, only natural ones that we use all of the time, although in some cases we use them for beliefs that we take for truths, when instead they are quite defective assumptions. A small example — one, incidentally, that I finally realized; but it is a beautiful instance of natural methods.

I heard the next day’s weather report, groaned, thought of a very uncomfortable 90-degree temperature tomorrow and imagined myself miserable with the heat. Indeed, I began to feel warmer. In a flash I remembered previous days of discomfort, and in the next moment I projected those into the weekend. I felt trapped. Midway through this process I tried to catch myself, but I believed that my body could not handle the heat — and that belief outweighed my intent to change my thoughts, so they kept returning for perhaps ten minutes.

I continued, however, to remind myself that I was not going to worry about tomorrow today, regardless. I told myself that the prediction might be wrong, and I began with my intellect to pile up evidence that could in one way or another bring about a different, more beneficial experience. I did this by recognizing the way I had earlier been building up the picture in the old manner, by collecting all the evidence that fitted it. I used the same process, only for a more beneficial picture, and the process works. We have only to become aware of it.

Our experience will follow our concentration and beliefs and expectation. The mind is a great discriminator. It can use its reasoning to bring about almost any possible experience within our framework.

The Ilda Family is Composed of The “Exchangers.”

They deal primarily in the great play of exchange and interchange of ideas, products, social and political concepts. They are travelers, carrying with them the ideas of one country to another, mixing cultures, religions, attitudes, political structures. They are explorers, merchants, soldiers, missionaries, sailors. They are often members of crusades.

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Throughout the ages they have served as the spreaders of ideas, the assimilators. They(The Ilda) turn up everywhere. They were pirates and slaves as well, historically speaking. They are often primarily involved in social changes. In our time they may be diplomats, as they were also in the past. Their characteristics are usually those of the adventuresome. Very seldom do they live in one place for long, although they may if their occupation deals with products from another land. individually they may seem highly diverse in nature, one from the other, but we will not find them as a rule in universities as teachers. We might find them as archaeologists in the field, however.

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A good many salesmen belong in this (Ilda) category. In our terms they may be cosmopolitan, and often wealthy, so that frequent travel is possible. On the other hand, however, in certain frameworks, a humble merchant in a small country who travels through nearby cities might also belong to this family. They are interested in the outsides of things, social mores, the marketplace, current popular religious ideas. They spread these from place to place. They are the seed-carriers, both literally and figuratively.

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They can be “con men,” selling products supposed to have miraculous values, blinding the local populace with their city airs. Yet even then they will be bringing with them the aura of other ideas, often inserting into closed areas concepts with which others are already familiar.

The members of this family of consciousness provide frequent new options. They may be scientists, or the strictest kind of conventional missionaries abroad in alien lands. In our present time they are sometimes Indians (from India, that is), or Africans or Arabs, journeying to our civilization. They add to the great flow of communication. They may be emotional rather than intellectual, as we understand those terms, but they are restless, usually on the move. They can be actors, also.

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In the past some (Ilda) have been great courtesans, and even though they were not able to travel physically, they were at the heart of communication– that is, a part of court life, or involved with diplomats who did travel.

Many of the courtesans who rule the salons of Europe belonged in the (Ilda) category. The Crusades involved great movement of this family, in which trade and commerce, and the exchange of political ideas, were far more important than the religious aspects. Some members of this family served as initiators of new orders in the (Catholic) church in the past–the worldly Jesuits, for example, and some of the more sophisticated popes, who had a fine eye out for commerce and wealth. These people may be appreciators of fine art, but usually for its commercial value.

Now we can often find then in the departments of government, in these areas where travel is involved, or in finance. They frequently enjoy, intrigue. All in all, they mix mores.

The Way In Which The Individual is Defined

Part of the difficulty arises from the current scientific-oriented blend of rationalism. As a species, we think of ourselves as the “pinnacle” end of an evolutionary scale, as if all other entities from the first cell onward somehow existed in a steady line of progression, culminating with animals, and finally with man and woman the reasoning animal. (with all of that progress occurring of course by chance, incidentally.)

That particular blend of rational thinking with which our society is familiar takes it more or less for granted, then, that  man’s and woman’s identity as a species, and the identity of the individual, is first and foremost connected with the intellect . We identify ourselves with our intellect, primarily, casting aside as much as possible other equally vital elements of our personhood.

In our historical past, when man and woman identified his or her identity with the soul, he or she actually gave himself or herself greater leeway in terms of psychological mobility, but eventually the concept of the soul as held resulted in a distrust of the intellect. That result was the inevitable follow-up of dogma. Part of man’s woman’s latest over-identification with the intellect is, of course, an overreaction to those past historical events. Neither religion or science grant other creatures much subjective dimension, however: We like to think of ourselves, again, as the reasoning animal in terms of our species.

However, animals do reason. They do not reason in the same areas that we do. In those areas in which they do reason, they understand cause and effect quite well. Their reasoning is applied, however, to levels of activity to which our own reasoning is not applied. Therefore, often animal reasoning is not apparent to us. Animals are curious. Their curiosity is applied to areas in which we seldom apply our own.

The animals possess a consciousness of self, and without the human intellect. We do not need a human intellect to be aware of our own consciousness. Animals, it is true, do not reflect upon the nature of their own identities as man and woman do, but this is because that nature is intuitively comprehended. It is self-evident.

I only want to show that the sense of identity need not inevitably be coupled with the intellect exclusively. Our intellect is a part of us — a vital, functioning portion of our cognitive processes — but it does not contain our identity.

The natural person is understood perhaps more clearly by considering any person as a child. In fashion the child discovers its own intellect, as it discovers its own feelings. Feelings come “first.” The child’s feelings give rise to curiosity, to thoughts, to the operation of the intellect: “Why do I feel thus and so? Why is grass soft, and rock hard? Why does a gentle touch soothe me, while a slap hurts me”

The feelings and sensations give rise to the questions, to the thoughts, to the intellect. The child in a fashion feels — feels — its own thoughts rise from a relative psychological invisibility into immediate, vital formation. There is a process there that we have forgotten. The child identifies with its own psychic reality first of all — then discovers its feelings, and claims those, and discovers its thoughts and intellect, and claims those.

The child first explores the components of its psychological environment, the inside stuff of subjective knowledge, and claims that inner territory, but the child does not identify its basic being with either its feelings or its thoughts. That is why, for example, it often seems that young children can die so easily. They can disentangle themselves because they have not as yet identified their basic beings with life experience.

In most cases children grow up, of course, although in the vast overall picture of nature a goodly proportion of individuals do indeed take other courses. They serve other functions, they have other purposes, they take part in life through a different cast of action. They affect life while themselves not completely immersed in it. They die young. They are aborted. They remain, however, an important element in life’s overall picture — part of a psychological underpainting that always affects later versions.

Ideally, however, children finally claim their feelings and their thoughts as their own. They identify naturally with both, finding each valid and vital. By the time we are an adult, however, we have been taught to disconnect our identity from our feelings as much as possible, and to think of our personhood in terms of our intellectual orientation. Our identity seems to be in our head. Our feelings and our mental activity therefore appear, often, quite contradictory. We try to solve all problems through the use of reasoning alone.

We are taught to submerge the very intuitive abilities that the intellect needs to do its proper work — for the intellect must check with the feeling portions of the self for feedback, for support, for knowledge as to biological conditions. Denied that feedback, it can spin on endlessly in frenzied dry runs.

At each moment, from the most microscopic levels the body in one way or another is ascertaining a constant picture of its position within physical reality. That picture is composed of millions of ever-changing smaller snapshots, as it were — or moving pictures is better — determining so many conditions, positions and relationships that they could never be described. We end up with a predominating picture of reality in any given moment — one that is the result of the activity of psychological, biological, and electromagnetic strats. One picture is transposed upon the others, and calculations made constantly, so that all of the components that make up physical existence are met, and intersect to give us life.

None of that is the intellect’s concern at an intellectual level. At a biological level, and at an electromagnetic level, the intellect, of course, performs feats that it cannot consciously know through the use of its reason. Spontaneously, with the process just mentioned, millions of pictures are being taken also of the probable actions that will — or may — be needed, in our terms, in the moment immediately following, from microscopic action to the motion of a muscle, the driving of a car, the reading of a book, or whatever.

One of the intellect’s main purposes is to give us a conscious choice in a world of probabilities. To do that properly the intellect is to make clear, concise decisions, on its level, of matters that are its concern, and therefore to present its own picture of reality to add to the entire construct. On the one hand we have been told to identify ourselves almost completely with our intellects. On the other hand, we have been taught that the intellect, the “flower of consciousness,” so  frail, vulnerable adjunct — again, a chance creation, without meaning and without support without support because we believe that “beneath it” lie “primitive, animalistic, bloody instincts,” against which reason must exert what strength it has.

Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity — a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood. When I tell you to remember your own natural persons, I do then want to remind you not to identify with your intellect alone, but to enlarge you scopes of identity. Automatically those other, often-shunted-aside characteristics begin to add their richness, fulfillment, and vitality to your lives effortlessly.

This new orientation will bring results, and the results do appear effortlessly. Remember that creative activity goes on within us all the time, and is often most active precisely when we are not aware of it. We are only aware of those moments when creative activity surges into our conscious awareness, and by then much of the “work” has already been done.

We are not responsible for other people’s realities, but we are responsible for our own. The Ill man’s or woman’s reality does not threaten our own in any way. The situation, however, shows that we sometimes still think we should be able to solve all problems, and to know all the reasons for any given sorrow or tragedy. The intellect cannot handle that kind of information at this level.

Some answers come when we are ready for them. Then they come naturally, as a matter of understanding and comprehension. The question of life’s tragedies still cannot be answered satisfactorily at the level at which any of us are currently asking it. I can give hints and clues and explanations that are quite valid within that context.

As a matter of fact, the kind of literal answers that we may think we want can indeed lead us somewhat astray in terms of the larger picture, so I must say: “That is not my province,” send energy, a note now and then; but the particular problem, the specific problem is the other’s, not mine’s.”

The reason for the problem is a philosophical concern of mine and of yours, but it is one whose answer — or answers — will gradually unfold. All of this information I consider necessary, again, to provide an overall atmosphere of comprehension that will allow the release of our own vitalities and strengths in an effortless manner, in such a way that our own problems begin to dissolve.

The kind of orientation I am speaking of represents the truest picture I can give of a man’s and woman’s natural relationship with himself or herself and the world. This is how it works. This is physical.

Styles of Thought

The scientific framework of reference has become equated with the term “rational thinking,” to such an extent that any other slant of thought automatically seems to be irrational. Thought has become, in that regard, too specialized, prejudiced, and inflexible.

Now there are styles of thought. Each individual has his or her own style of thinking, a peculiar, rich, individual mixture of speculations, fantasies, ideocentric ways of using subjective and objective data. Science has so dominated the world of thought, however, that many nuances and areas once considered quite “rational” have become quite unrespectable. Science  tries to stick to what it can prove.

Unfortunately, it tends to set up a worldview that is then based upon certain material only. We end up with separate disciplines: biology, psychology, physics, mathematics, and so forth, each with its own group of facts, jealously guarded, each providing its own worldview: the world as seen through biology, or reality as seen through the eyes of physics.

There is no separate field that combines all of that information, or applies the facts of one discipline to the facts of another discipline, so overall, science, with its brand of rational thought, can offer no even, suggestive, hypothetical, comprehensive ideas of what reality is. It seems that each individual is in effect isolated in certain vital regards — given, say, a genetic heritage and a certain amount of unspecified energy with which to run the body’s machinery. Intent, purpose, or desire do not apply in that picture.

The individual is, again, a stranger, almost an alien, in his or her own environment, in which he must struggle to survive, not only against the “uncaring” forces of the immediate environment, but against the genetic determinism. He or she must fight against his or her own body, overemphasize its susceptibility to built-in defects, diseases, and against a built-in time bomb, so to speak, when without warning extinction will arrive. Science does not stress the cooperative forces of nature. It glories in distinctions, specifications, and categories, and is quite blind, generally speaking, to the uniting forces that are of course every bit as real. Therefore, when I speak of the natural person being also the magical person, it is easy to transpose even that idea into more isolated terms than I intend.

It is not just that each person has his or her source in a “magical” dimension, from which his or her overall life emerges, but that the private source itself is a part of the very energy that upholds the entire planet and its inhabitants, and the overall construct that we understand as the universe.

Fields, or planes of interrelatedness connect all kinds of life, supporting it not through, say, just one system — a biological one or a spiritual one — but at every conceivable point of its existence. We are not just given so much energy, in those terms earlier mentioned. “New” energy is everywhere available. Again, there are no closed systems. Again, the environment is conscious and alive. There are constant communications between all positions of our body and all portions of the environment.

In our terms this means that we do not have to rely upon what we think of as our private resources alone. Basically, value fulfillment is one of the most important characteristics of existence, so that all things act individually and together in ways that best provide for the overall fulfillment of the entire construct.

We were born because we desired to be born. A plant comes to life for the same reason. We live in a different frame of reference than a plant, however: We have more choice available. We interact with nature differently. Our intellect is meant to help us make choices. It allows us to perceive certain probabilities within  a physical time context. We use the intellect properly when it is allowed to perceive physical conditions as clearly as possible. Then it can make the most beneficial decisions as to what goals we want to achieve.

Those goals are usually conceptualized desires, and once formed they act in a fashion like magnets, drawing from those vast fields of interrelatedness the kinds of conditions best suited to their fulfillment. The intellect alone cannot bring about the fulfillment of those goals. The intellect alone cannot bring about one motion of the body. It must count upon those other properties that it does indeed set into motion — that spontaneous array of inner complexity, that orderly magic.

When the intellect is used properly, it thinks of a goal and automatically sets the body in motion toward it, and automatically arouses the other levels of communication unknown to it, so that all forces work together toward the achievement. Consider a hypothetical goal as a target. When properly used, the intellect imagines the target and imaginatively then attains it. If it were a physical target, the person would stand bow and arrow in hand, thinking only of hitting the bull’s eye, mentally concentrating upon it, making perhaps some learned gestures — proper footing or whatever — and the body’s magical properties would do the rest.

When the intellect is improperly used, however, it is as if the intellect feels required to somehow know or personally direct all of those inner processes. When the erroneous belief systems and negativity connected with so-called rational reason apply, then it is as if our person sees the target, but instead of directing his or her attention to it he of she concentrates upon all of the different ways that his or her arrow could go wrong: It could fall to the left or the right, go too far or not far enough, break in the air, fall from his or her hand, or in multitudinous other ways betray his or her intent.

He or she has switched his or her attention from the target, of course, completely. He or she projected upon the present event the picture of his or her fears, rather than the picture of his or her original intent. His or her body, responding to his or her mental images and his or her thoughts, brings out actions that mirror his or her confusion.

In other words, the magical approach and the so-called rational one are to be combined in a certain fashion for best results. People sometimes write me, telling of their intent to make money — or rather, to have it. They concentrate upon money, so they say, and wait for it in full faith that it will be attracted to them because of their belief and concentration. They might do the point of power exercise, for example. They may also, however, have quit their jobs, ignored impulses to find other work, or to take any rational approaches, and rely upon, say, the magical approach alone. This does not work either, of course.

As I uses the magical approach, and as you use it, we will see that it blends in perfectly with the rest of existence, inspires the intellect, inspires physical motion — for it activates physical properties.

I will continue describing the ways the two approaches work together. The main point I want to make is, however, the fact that out private source of power is a portion of that greater field of interrelatedness, in which our being is securely couched. It is not something we have to strain after. It was effortlessly ours at birth, and before, and it carries with it its own emotional and intuitive comprehensions — comprehensions that can indeed support us throughout all of our physical existence. If we understand that, then in a large manner many of our fears will jointly vanish.

All Other Species Preserve Nature, While Man and Woman Has a Propensity for Destroying It

I have myself heard it said that other creatures behave with a natural grace, save man and woman. I have myself heard it said that all of nature is content unto itself save man and woman, who is filled with discontent. Such thoughts follow “naturally” the dictums of so-called rational thought. When we think such thoughts, we think of them at the most strained level of intellectual speculation — that is, the thoughts seem self-evident to the intellect that is forced to operate by itself, relatively speaking, divorced from the self’s other faculties. It then does indeed seem that man and woman is somehow apart from nature — or worse, an ungrateful blight, almost a parasite, upon the face of the planet.

That view itself is a symptom of the intellect’s difficulty. In the position in which our culture places the intellect, it does see itself quite alone, separated both from other portions of the personalities, from other creatures, and from nature itself. Therefore science, for example, says that creatures — except for man and woman — operate by blind instinct, and that term is meant to explain all of the complicated behavior of the other species. Therefore the gulf between man and woman and animals, the intellect and nature, seems to deepen.

In those terms, it is quite as truthful to say that man’s and woman’s intellect is also instinctive. He or she begins thinking at once. He and she cannot help but use his or her intellect. The intellect, again, operates magically, spontaneously, automatically. It’s most keen reasoning processes rise as a result of that natural magical action.

The intellect has been taught to divorce itself from its source. It realizes in that regard a sense of powerlessness, for to some extent it is philosophically cut off from its own source of power. When it looks, therefore, at world of political events, the problems seem insoluble. Man and woman makes decisions that may seem quite wrong to the intellect because of its belief systems, and because it is so cut off from other sources of information. A goodly number of those mistaken decisions, or “poor moves,” often represent self-corrective actions, decisions taken on knowledge not consciously perceived, but this escapes our consciousness.

In the same way, some private-life decisions or events may appear disadvantageous to the intellect for the same reasons, while instead they are also self-corrective measures that we are not able to perceive because of our beliefs. The rational approach, as it is now used, carries a basic assumption that anything that is wrong will get worse. That belief of course is highly detrimental because it runs against the basic principles of life. Were this the case in our terms of history, the world would never have lasted a century. It is interesting to note that even before medical science, there were a goodly number of healthy populations. No disease rubbed out the entire species.

When we believe that the worst will happen we must always be on guard. In our culture people use the term “intellect” almost like a weapon to protect themselves against impending disaster. They must be alert for dangers of all kinds. They begin to collect evidence of danger so that any other kind of orientation to life seems foolhardy, and to be a realist means in that framework to look out for the worst.

First of all, if we realize that the intellect itself is a part of nature, a part of the natural person, a part of magical processes, then we need not overstrain it, force it to feel isolated, or put it in a position in which paranoid tendencies develop. It is itself supported, as our intuitions are, by life’s magical processes. It is supported by the greater energy that gave us and the world birth. That power is working in the world, and in the world of politics, as it is in the working of nature, since we make that distinction.

When we follow that so-called rational approach, however, we are bound to feel threatened, divorced from our body. Our thoughts and our body seem separate. Divisions seem to appear between the mental and the physical, where again each are supported by those magical processes. That rational approach goes against what I can only call life’s directives and life’s natural rhythms. It is contradictory to biological integrity, and again, it does not make sense.

That rational approach is, of course, connected now with scientific ideas mentioned earlier: life surrounded by chaos, the struggle for survival, and so forth. I do not mean to put down the intellect. It is highly important, but it is, if you will forgive me, as natural as a cat’s whiskers. It is not some adjunct to nature, but a part it.

The magical approach takes is for granted, in the simplest terms, that the life of any individual will fulfill itself, will develop and mature, that the environment and the individual are uniquely suited and work together. This sounds very simple. In verbal terms, however, those are the beliefs of each cell. They are imprinted in each chromosome, in each atom. they provide a built-in faith that pervades each living creature, each snail, each hair on our head. Those ingrained beliefs are, of course, biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and development.

Each cell believes in a better tomorrow. I am, I admit, personifying our cell here, but the statement has a firm truth. Furthermore, each cell contains within itself a belief and an understanding of its own inevitability. It knows it lives beyond its death, in other words.

The idea of heaven, for all of its distortions, has operated as a theoretical framework, assuring the intellect of its survival. Science has believed to the contrary in the utter annihilation of the intellect after death, and since man and woman had by then placed all of his or her identification with the intellect, this was a shattering blow to it. It denied man and woman a necessary biological imperative.

All of these reasons lie beneath men’s and women’s mass problems, and apply in each life.  I feel I have never learned to use the power of reason, and instead trust every stray thought that comes into my head. So to doubt myself is protective.

I also feel that the questioning power of the intellect is not just one of its functions –which it is — but is primary purpose, which it is not. In our terms the intellect’s primary function is to make clear deductions and distinctions involving the personality’s relationship with the world. Our society, however, has indeed considered the rational approach to be the masculine-favored one — so I have an additional reason in that regard to be such a proponent of the rational approach. All of the beliefs connected with the sex were of course erroneous, but they are part and parcel of the “rational” framework itself.

It is certainly too simple to say what I am going to say, yet it is almost as if we would be better off turning the entire rational approach upside down, taking it for granted that all of its assumptions were false, for they are indeed more false than true. Again, the result of highly spontaneous processes of which it itself knows nothing, and the intuitions that are considered so undisciplined and unreasonable are based upon calculations far more spectacular than those of which the conscious mind can conceive. The intellect could not follow them, so the distinctions are not basic: They are the result of beliefs and habitual usage. Therefore, of course, I speak of them separately, as we think of them.

The magical approach takes it for granted that the human being is a united creature, fulfilling purposes in nature even as the animals do, whether or not those purposes are understood. The magical approach takes it for granted that each individual has a future, a fulfilling one, even though death may be tomorrow. The magical approach takes it for granted that the means for development are within each individual, and that fulfillment will happen naturally. Overall, that approach operates in our world. If it did not, there would be no world. If the worst was bound to happen, as the scientists certainly think, even evolution, in their terms, would have been impossible, of course.

You needed this background, for I want to build up the atmosphere in which this magical approach can be comprehended. Then specific material can be utilized.

In our dreams we are, of course, in the process of forming new ideas about the nature of the magical self and also in our way working that idea out through imagery. The dreams are above all an example of “work” being done at other levels of awareness.

All of these experiences are indications of the exquisite kind of reasoning that goes on at the levels of awareness that are usually considered unreasonable. That kind of material enriches the intellect and reassures it.

Certain portions of the personality or psyche must very shrewdly and carefully construct dreams in advance, so that when the dreams are played back they render just the right message to the parts of the psyche that need it. I’m not being contradictory here when I write that the dream is a spontaneous production, also.
Continue reading All Other Species Preserve Nature, While Man and Woman Has a Propensity for Destroying It

Only Human Beings, With Their Ideas of ‘Progress” and “Development Change.

Over very long spans of time the earth and all of its creatures stay the same, relatively speaking. Human beings haven’t changed, really, our more complicated mental processes only make it seem that we have. Coupled with this is the idea that magic, as we call it, reflects a basic part of our natural mental equipment and abilities, but that our present course of action, our focusing upon the material and the intellectual — the ‘reasonable” portions of quite ‘unreasonable’ or unreal. Actually, our need for magic is a very real, vital, and integral portion of our psyches.

The conscious idea of  magic, then, is a mask, or contrived version, of the psyche’s innate clairvoyant, telepathic, and precognitive abilities. We permit distorted versions of those attributes to surface as magic, as entertainment — which thus relieves us of the need to take them seriously. That’s the course our species has chosen during much of our recorded history, so far, and for many reasons.

I think that it’s frustrating for us that we cannot perceive the fascinating facets of any event. We still do not feel the unsurpassable force that thoughts have. We do not understand that they do form events, that to change events we must first change thoughts. We get what we concentrate upon.

The Intellect and The Magical Approach

It is not that we overuse the intellect as a culture, but that we rely upon it to the exclusion of all other faculties in our approach to life.

The intellect is brilliant, but on its own, it is indeed in its way isolated both in time and in space in a way that other portions of the personality are not. When it is overly stressed, with all of the usual frameworks or rationales that go along with it, it can indeed become frightened, paranoid, because it cannot really perceive events until they have already occurred. It does not know what will happen tomorrow, and since it is overly stressed, its paranoid tendencies can only fear the worst.

Now those tendencies are not natural to the intellect, but only appear when it is forced to operate in such an isolated fashion — isolated not only in time and space, but psychologically isolated from other portions of the personality that are meant to bring it additional information that it does not possess, and a kind of magical support.

The so-called rational approach to life, as it is practiced, is a highly pessimistic one carrying along with it its own methods and “solutions” to problems, its own means of achieving ends and satisfying desires. Many people are so steeped in that approach to life that they become psychologically blind to any other kind of orientation. Such is obviously not the case for me or I would not be having this discussion, or any other such activity.

The rational approach of course suits certain kinds of people better than others, even while it still carries its disadvantages. We have been living in an industrialized scientific society, so that the benefits and the great disadvantages of the rational approach appear everywhere in the social and political world. Artists of any kind find such an approach the least friendly, for it directly contradicts the vast thrust or man’s and woman’s creativity in several important areas. I, however, have evidence that hardened reality is quite different. In the past I have felt at some disadvantage myself, feeling ,my work to be theoretically fascinating, creatively valid, but not necessarily containing any statement about any kind of “scientifically valid” hardened reality.

I did not think I was dealing with fiction. On the other hand, I was not willing to call is fact, either. I am, in fact, dealing with a larger version of fact from which the world of fact emerges.

There have been numerous fascinating bits of evidence in our own lives, apart from these blog discussions, though certainly to some extent stimulated by the knowledge we gain in the discussions. They remain isolated bits, odds and ends, in which case they begin to present us with a larger factual representation of reality.

All of this material applies to our lives in general and to my physical condition, because we must be clear in our minds as to our own status in that regard, and much of this material will clear the air and dissolve lingering doubts; doubts that cause us to hold on to the rational approach in a misguided effort to maintain what we think of as a balanced viewpoint and open mind. It seems, because of the definitions we have been taught, that there is only one narrow kind of rationality, and that if we forsake the boundary of that narrow definition, then we become irrational, fanatic, mad, or whatever.

The thin, cold “rationality” that is recognized as such is instead a fake veneer covering a far deeper spontaneous rationality, and it is the existence of that magical rationality that provides the basis for the intellect to begin with. The rationality that we accept is then but one small clue as to the spontaneous inner rationality that is a part of each natural person.

For example, in one dream when asleep, when we are seemingly not rational, when our intellect is seemingly not operating, we perceive information about our physical environment. Old neighborhoods, animals and industry in every place. Symbolically we see situations in our own fashion, but know. We still have a love of certain areas. We are in a certain correspondence with it. In a fashion, we keep our eye out for information regarding it.

We are somewhat idealizing the past, present and future, however, so we do not simply get the information “straight on,” but we receive it in such a fashion that it makes its own psychological points also, and is furthermore wound into other action not only within the dream, but in a series of dreams.

Any dream makes it’s point, in fact, whether or not we remembered it. Some people remember because they want to bring into their conscious range instances of their own greater knowing. The portion of us that form the dreams knows. All of this involves a psychological motion of natural, magical import. It shows us that the rules of the rational world are filled with holes. It shows us that the rational world’s views do not represent the bulwarks of safety, but are instead barriers to the full use of the intellect, and of the intuitions.

Free flow of information at other levels.

Now when we understand that intellectually, then the intellect can take it for granted that its own information is not all the information we possess. It can realize that its own knowledge represents the tip of the iceberg. As we apply that realization to our life we begin to realize furthermore that in practical terms we are indeed supported by a greater body of knowledge that we consciously realize, and by the magical, spontaneous fountain of action that forms our existence. The intellect can then realize that it does not have to go it all alone. Everything does not have to be reasoned out, even to be understood.

This information is factual. I am not forced at times into symbolic statements, but when I am I always say so, and even those statements are my best representations of facts too large for our definitions. The intellect, then, can and does form strong paranoid tendencies when it is put in the position of believing that it must solve all personal problems alone — or nearly — and certainly when it is presented with any picture of worldwide predicaments.

The rational approach, built up around this framework, insists that the best way to solve a problem is to concentrate upon it, to project its effects into the future, to ruminate upon its consequences, “to stare at the bare facts head on.”

This brings about an atmosphere in which the problem is compounded. The intellect on its own — so it seems — must deal not only with the problem today, but with its effects in the projected disastrous tomorrows. This well-intentioned concentration, this determination to solve the problem, this rational approach, then causes an even deeper sense of inadequacy. The concentration upon the problem brings about a kind of mechanical repetition, a repeated type of hypnotic focus.

The intellect is a great organizer — along certain lines, now — so if this concentration is continued it begins to organize its perceptions and experience along the same lines. It is a kind of misguided attempt to find order by finding data that agree with itself. It collects evidence, then, to prove its point, because the rational mind, as we understand it, must  have an acceptable reason for everything.

In the meantime, of course, quite valid rockbed evidence that does not fit into the picture gradually becomes discarded, ignored, thrown away. It is there but it is not used. It disappears as evidence, becomes inactive. That method of problem-solving, need I say, is a poor one, and if anything it causes far more problems than it ever solves.

In terms of a physical condition, some people often thinks that he or she is “faced with the evidence” that his or her condition is not improving, that it is growing worse, that all the evidence says such conditions do deteriorate rather than improve. He or she sometimes thinks he or she is being rational with such thoughts.

What happens, of course, is the process I have just outlined. Other quite real, quite physical evidence — always, now, apparent in his or her body at any given time — is ignored as nonessential, too trivial to bother with, or take seriously, because it does not fit into the so-called rational picture that has been developed.

The process is exactly as given in the paragraph above, so I want that understood. Any improvement, unless stated, is almost overlooked, not considered as much hard evidence, while any difficulties definitely are considered hard evidence because they fit into the overall data-collecting intellect, as stated above. They are significant, while the improvements do not seem to be nearly as much so.

When we are corresponding with the environment, we change our focus point. We change what we consider significant. This blog brings us to the beginning of a discussion of the magical approach to life, to the solving of problems. I hope to stress what to do, rather than what not to do, although at times I must make the distinction clear.

If you understand this blog thoroughly, and if you have the intent to really change your orientation, then the atmosphere will automatically  be created in which desired changes occur.

 

 

 

 

True Creativity Comes From Enjoying The Moments

True creativity comes from enjoying the moments, which then fulfill themselves, and a part of the creative process is indeed the art of relaxation, the letting go, for that triggers magical activity.

I want it understood that we are indeed dealing with two entirely different approaches to reality and to solving problems — methods we will here call the rational method and the magical one. The rational approach works quite well in certain situations, such as mass production of goods, or in certain kinds of scientific measurements — but all in all the rational method, as it is understood and used, does not work as an overall approach to life, or in the solving of problems that involve subjective rather objective measurements or calculations.

Those methods work least of all for any art. It is a trite statement, perhaps, but the ruler’s measurements have absolutely nothing to do with the measurements made by the heart, and they can never be used to express the incalculable measurements that are made automatically by the smallest cell.

The rational mind alone, as it is presently used ( because it is a rather artificial construct, a function given prominence), can never understand the dream measurements that we undertake.

Keeping psychic activity in line, in our society this seems the only rational thing to do. Ironically, our problems have not been solved, then largely of course because we have taken the wrong approach, and that is because we are not convinced as yet. We still hold to those trained beliefs.

The old beliefs, of course, and the rational approach, are everywhere reinforced, and so it does indeed have a great weight. The magical approach has far greater weight, if we use it and allow ourselves to operate in that fashion, for it has the weight of our basic natural orientation. The rational approach is the superimposed one. I think my blog readers are ready to understand that.

Inner reality, contain the creative source from which we form all events, and  that by the proper focusing of attention we can draw from that vast subjective medium everything we need for a constructive, positive life in physical reality.

Any event, therefore, has an invisible thickness, a multidimensional basis. Our skies are filled with breezes, currents, clouds, sunlight, dust particles and so forth. The sky vaults above the entire planet. The invisible [vault of] inner reality contains endless patterns that change as, say, clouds do — that mix and merge to form our psychological climate. Thoughts have what we will for now term electromagnetic properties. In those terms our thoughts mix and match with others in inner reality, creating mass patterns that form the overall psychological basis behind world events. Again, however, inner reality is not neutral, but automatically inclined toward what we will here term good or constructive developments. It is a growth medium. Constructive or ‘positive’ feelings or thoughts are more easily materialized than ‘negative’ ones because they are in keeping with inner reality’s characteristics.

Instant Magic Represents Part of Our Natural Heritage

Magic as we call it represents (reflects) a basis part of our natural heritage. We permit distorted versions of the psyche’s attributes — clairvoyant, telepathic, and precognitive abilities — which surface as magic.

We are practicing some precise psychological art, one that is ancient and poorly understood in our culture; or as of we are learning a psychological science that helps us map the contours of consciousness itself. My blog readers and I are finally examining the trance view of reality and comparing it to the official views of science and religion.

The natural person is indeed the magical person, and my blog readers and I have both to some extent had very recent examples of such activity. We were, and are, trying to teach ourselves something. This is somewhat lengthy to unravel, but our behavior and experience, or course, is the result of our beliefs. Framed -mind-2 has been a rather fascinating but mainly hypothetical framework, in that neither of us have really been able to put it to any perceivable use in our terms. This is not to say it has not been operating. We have not had the kind of feedback, however that we want.

When we were both intensely involved in our projects, just finished, we let much of our inner experience slide, relatively speaking. The two of us operating together, however, then came up with an idea — an important one — that allows us to interpret the Framed-mind-2 material in our own ways. We had instant feedback — the interplay of a creative nature between the two of us involving our dreams and the computer, and so forth. We were each struck by the magical ease with which we seemed, certainly, to perceive and act — information that we did not even realize we possessed.

Some of my notes that my blog readers have not seen have further important insights as to such activity. The main point is indeed the importance of accepting a different kind of overall orientation — one that is indeed not any secondary adjunct, but a basic part of human nature. This involves an entirely different relationship of the self we know with time. We can make our own connections here, as per our own dreams of late.

Important misunderstanding involving time have been in a large measure responsible for many difficulties, and also of my own, though they have been of a lesser nature. All of this involves relating to reality in more natural, and therefore magical, fashion. There is certainly a kind of natural physical time in our experience, and in the experience of any creature. It involves the rhythm of the seasons — the days and nights and tides and so forth. In the light of that kind of physical time, which is involved within earthly biology, there is no basic cultural time. That is, to this natural rhythm we have culturally added the idea of clocks, moments and hours and so forth, which we have transposed over nature’s rhythms.

Such a cultural time works well overall for the civilization that concentrates upon partialities, bits and pieces, assembly lines, promptness of appointments, and so forth. It fits an industrialized society as we understand it.

The time that any artistic creator is involved with follows earth’s own time, however. The creator’s time rises out of the seasons and the tides, even though in our society we make a great effort to fit the creator’s time into what I will call assembly-line time. If you are a writer or an artist, then it seems that you must produce so many paintings or books or whatever as, say, an automobile worker must process so many pieces of the overall car chassis. Particularly  if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that “each minute is valuable” — but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production. But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it.

I have culturally felt, for many reasons that have been discussed, that each moment must be devoted to work. My blog readers have to some extent felt the same. I said that the artistic creator operates in the time of the seasons and so forth, in a kind of natural time — but that natural time is far different than we suppose. Far richer, and it turns inward and outward and backward and forward upon itself.

Being our own natural and magical self when we dream, we utilize information that is outside of the time context experienced by the so-called rational mind. The creative abilities operate in the same fashion, appearing within consecutive time, but with the main work done outside of it entirely. Sometimes when we finish our project, we have several days of feeling miserable, but we catch ourselves and turn ourselves around beautifully, and we have every right to congratulate oneself in that regard.

When my blog readers and I are both working on projects our cultural time is taken up in a way we find acceptable. Creative time and cultural time to some extent merge, in that we could see daily immediate evidence of creativity’s product, coming out of the computer, say, like any product of an assembly line. We are “using” time as our cultural training told us to do.

When the projects were done, particularly with me, there is still the cultural belief that time should be so used, that creativity must be directed and disciplined to fall into the proper time slot. In other words, to some extent or another I tried to use an assembly-lined kind of time for my creative productivity. This may work when my blogs are being typed, and so much physical labor is involved, but overall I am using the “wrong” approach to time, particularly for any creative artist. This again applies particularly to me, though my blog readers are not exonerated in that regard.

There is much material here that I will give, because it is important that we understand different ways of relating to reality, and how those ways create the experienced events.

We have not really, either my blog readers or I, been ready to drastically alter our orientations, but we are approaching that threshold. The magical approach means that we actually change our methods of dealing with problems, achieving goals, and satisfying means. We change over to the methods of the natural person. They are not esoteric methods by which man or woman are meant to handle his or her problems and approach his or her challenges.

I use the word “methods” because we understand it, but actually we are speaking about an approach to life, a magical or natural approach to life that is man’s and woman’s version of the animal’s natural instinctive behavior in the universe.

That approach does indeed fly in direct contradiction to the learned methods we have been taught. We have held onto those methods to varying degrees, since after all it seems that the world shares them. They are understood ways of dealing with events. Once again, however, with the experience of the last few days, I am astonished by the magical ease by which work — real work — can be accomplished: events perceived out of place and time and so forth.

All of that can be transferred to other areas of our lives, and in particular to physical difficulties.

It certainly seems that the best way to get specific answers is to ask specific questions, and the rational mind thinks first of all something like a list of questions. In that regard, I am responding before a blog is natural, and to an extent magical, because I know that no matter what I have been taught, I must to some degree forget the questions and the mood that accompanies them with one level of consciousness, in order to create the proper kind of atmosphere at another level of consciousness — an atmosphere that allows the answers to come even though they may be presented in a different way than expected by the rational mind.

What I will be discussing in the next several blogs, will be the magical approach to reality, and to our private lives specifically, in order to create that kind of atmosphere in which the answers become experienced.

Trying to fit the great thrust of creativity into assembly-line time is in itself bound to lead to conflicts, dissatisfactions, and frustrations. If the proper creative and magical orientation is kept primarily in mind, other things will fall into place. We do not say to the creative self “Now it is 7:30. People are at their assembly lines. I am at my desk: produce.”

Assembly-line time does not really value time — only as time can be used for definite prescribed purposes. In that framework, to enjoy time becomes a weakness or vice, and both my blog readers and I, to some extent have so considered time. With creative people strongly gifted, the natural person is very prominent, no matter what they do. It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience. It knows, for example, how to enjoy encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities. It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints.

The natural person is anything but irrational. It gathers all of experience together and transforms it, so many of our problems have been caused by applying the wrong kind of orientation to our lives and activities.

I say wrong, meaning no moral judgment, but the application of one method to a pursuit that cannot be adequately expressed in such a fashion. The assembly-line time and the beliefs that go along with it have given us many benefits as a society, but it should not be for gotten that the entire framework was initially set up to cut down on impulses, creative thought, or any other activities that would lead to anything but the mindless repetition of one act after another.

In other words, that entire framework is meant to give us a standardized, mass-produced version of reality. None of its concepts can rationally be applied to creative endeavors. The orientation that gives us the creative achievement lies in the opposite direction.

Creativity itself has its own built-in discipline, the kind that, for example, in a dream can rummage through the days of the future to find precisely the data required to make a specific point.

All of this material applies to each of our condition, and an understanding of it will create the climate in which beneficial results can appear.

Normal Dreams

I believe that normal dreams are the outside shell of deeper inside experience. The interior reality is clothed in dream images as, when we are awake, it is clothed in physical ones. Dream objects and physical objects alike are symbols by which we perceive — and distort — an inner reality that we do not seem able to experience directly. In certain states of consciousness, particularly in projections from the dream state, we achieve a peculiar poise of alertness. This lets us briefly examine the nature of our consciousness by allowing us to view its products — the events and experiences that it creates when released from usual physical focus.

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Consciousness forms its own reality, physical and otherwise. I think there is a “mass” dream experience, however, as there is a collectively perceived physical life and definite interior conditions within which dream life happens. Only inner experimentation will let us discover this interior landscape. Perhaps one day we will move freely within it, alert, conscious and far wiser than we are now.

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It is a dimension native to consciousness, I believe, at whatever stage of being, physical or nonphysical. We have our primary existence in it after death and spend a good deal of physical time wandering through it, unknowingly, in sleep. Clues as to our creativity and the nature of our existence can be found there and from it emerges the organizational qualities of normal consciousness as we know it.

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I do not believe that there are any more dangers facing us in the interior universe than there are in the physical one. We should explore each world with common sense and courage. The interior universe is the source of the exterior one, however, and traveling through it we will encounter our own hopes, fears and beliefs in their ever-changing form.

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And so the exterior emerges from the interior one even as this physical blog materialized from the inner reality of inspiration, creativity and dreams.

 

Basic Reality in The Dream, Hallucination and Objects

We will sometimes automatically translate this reality into physical terms. Such images will be hallucinatory, but it may take awhile for us to distinguish their true nature. It must be understood, however, that all physical objects are hallucinatory. They may be called mass hallucination.

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There is constant translation of inner reality into objects in the waking state and a constant translation of ideas into pseudo-objects in the dream state. Within a certain range of dream reality, ideas and thoughts can be translated into pseudo-objects and transported. This is what happens when we adopt a pseudo-form in projection, though I am simplifying this considerably.

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When we travel beyond a certain range of intensities, even pseudo-objects must vanish. They exist in a cluster about, and connected to, our own system. The lack of these, obviously, means that we have gone beyond our own camouflage system. If it were possible, we would then travel through a range of intensities in which no camouflage of the next system. This would or would not encounter the heart of the camouflage area. The completely un-camouflaged areas at the outer edges of the various systems should remind us of the undifferentiated areas between various life cycles in the subconscious. This is no coincidence.

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As a rule, we see, there is little communication within the un-camouflaged areas. They act as boundaries, even while they represent the basic stuff of which all camouflage is composed. (Without the camouflage, we would perceive nothing with the physical senses.)

The sentence is really meaningless, however, because the physical senses are themselves camouflage. There would be nothing to translate. It is only the inner senses that will allow us to perceive under these circumstances. Theoretically, if we can bridge the gap between our system and another.

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Once more: The undifferentiated layers are composed of the vitality that forms the camouflage of all systems. Such an area is not really a thing in itself, but a portion of vitality that contains no camouflage, and is therefore unrecognizable to those within any given system. We are in touch with infinity in such areas, since it is only camouflage that gives us the conception of time.

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Now, during some projections, we may be aware of nothing as far as surroundings are concerned. There will only be the mobility of our own consciousness. If this occurs, we will be traveling through such an un-camouflaged area. We could then expect to encounter next a more differentiated environment, that seems to become clearer as we progress toward the heart of another system.

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The completely un-camouflaged layer would be rather bewildering. We might automatically be tempered to project images into it. They would not take, so to speak, but would appear and disappear with great rapidity. This is a silent area. thoughts would not be perceived here, as a rule, for the symbols for them would not be understood.

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If a certain intensity is reached, however — a peak of intensity — then we would perceive the spacious present as it exists within our native system. We could, from this peak, look into other systems, but we would not understand what we perceived, not having the proper root assumptions. I have used the idea of neighboring systems for simplicity’s sake, as if they were laid out end to end. Obviously, such is not the case. The systems of reality are more like the various segments of a tangerine, with the un-camouflaged boundary areas like the white membrane between the tangerine sections.

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The tangerine, then, would be compared to a group of many systems, yet it would represent in itself but one portion of an unperceived whole. The tangerine would be but one segment of a larger system. We can see, then, why some projections would lead us in a far different direction from our linear sort of travel and why time as we know it would be meaningless.

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Nor do such projections necessarily involve journeys through space as we know it. There are systems, vivid in intensity, that have no existence in physical reality at all. It is now thought, I believe, that time and space are basically one, but they are both a part of something else. They are merely the camouflage patterns by which we perceive reality. Space as we perceive it in the dream state comes much closer to the reality.

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Projections within our own system will, of course, involve us with some kind of camouflage. If none is present, we will know we are out of the system. The dream universe is obviously closely connected with our own, since pseudo-objects are present. Even there, we are to some extent free from the space-time elements of our own system. Within the dream state, then, we are in the ‘outward’ areas of the physically oriented universe.

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One point: There are other systems all about and within our own. The undifferentiated areas move out like spirals, through all reality. Little resistance is encountered with them. They represent inner roads that connect systems, as well as divide them. The traveler must leave his or her own camouflage.

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It is possible, theoretically, to travel to any system in this manner and bypass others, you see. Such a traveler would not age physically. His or her body would be in a suspended state. Only a very few individuals have traveled in this manner. Most of the knowledge gained escape the ego, and the experience cannot be translated by the physical brain.

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However, it is possible to travel under such circumstances, and some of the data would be retained by inner portions of the self. In a creative individual, some of this information might be symbolically expressed in a painting or other work of art.

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Each brushstroke of a painting represents concentrated experience and compressed perceptions. In a good painting, these almost explode when perceived by the lively consciousness of another. The observer is washed over by the intensities. The excellent work of art recreates for the observer inner experience of his or her own, also, of which he or she has never been aware. As we know, paintings have motion, yet the painting itself does not move. This idea should help understand experience in terms of intensities and projections or the movement of consciousness without necessarily motion through space.

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True motion has nothing to do with space. The only real motion is that of the traveling consciousness.

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These dimensions as we know it, and I believe that in them we exercise abilities that are ours by right and heritage.