Men and women slept long hours, as did the animals — awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain sustenance, and later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories — building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.
These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.
The species — from our viewpoint — lived at a much slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to course so quickly through the veins and arteries, the heart did not need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.
In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all-pervasive sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man and woman was aware of its support in a luxurious, intimate fashion. He/she was aware of himself or herself in a different way, so that, for example, his and her identification with the self did not stop where his or her skin stopped. He and she could follow it outward into the space about his or her form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal sense-experience that we have forgotten.
During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge man and woman gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the conscious units translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into physical form.
Then in our terms man and woman began, with the other species, to waken more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man and woman still sleeps and dreams, and that state is still a firm connective with his or her own origins, and with the origins of the universe as he or she knows it as well.
Man and woman dreamed his or her languages. He and she dreamed how to use his or her tongue to form the words. In his or her dreams he/she practiced stringing the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he or she could consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was begun, yet in the faith that he/she could and would complete it.
All languages have as their basis the language that was spoken in dreams. The need for language arose, however, as man woman became less a dreamer and more immersed in the specifics of space and time, for in the dream state his/her communications with his or her fellows and other species was instantaneous. Language arose to take the place of that inner communication, then. There is a great underlying unity in all of man’s and woman’s so-called early cultures — cave drawings and religions — because they were all fed by that common source, as man and woman tired to transpose inner knowledge into physical actuality.
The body learned to maintain its stability, its strength and agility, to achieve a state of balance in complementary response to the weather and elements, to dream computations that the conscious mind alone could not hold. The body learned to heal itself in sleep in its dreams — and at certain levels in that state even now each portion of consciousness contributes to the health and stability of all other portions. Far from the claw-and dagger universe, we have one whose very foundation is based upon the loving cooperation of all its parts. That is given — the gift of life brings along with it the actualization of that cooperation, for the body’s parts exist as a unit because of inner relationships of a cooperative nature: and those exist at our birth when we are innocent of any cultural beliefs that may be to the contrary.
If it were not for this most basic, initial loving cooperation, that is a given quality in life itself, life would not have continued. Each individual of each species takes that initial zest and joy of life as its own yardstick. Each individual of whatever species, and each consciousness, whatever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the quality of life itself — not only for itself but for all of reality as well.
This is a given characteristic of life, regardless of the beliefs that may lead us to misinterpret the actions of nature, casting some of its creatures in a reprehensible light.
In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense creativity, dreamed all of life’s creatures in all of their pasts, presents, and futures — that is, their dreams opened up the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have been released into actualization, even as, for example, the units of consciousness were once released from the mind of All That Is.
All possible entities that can ever be actualized always exist. They have always existed and they always will exist. All That Is must, by its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence — and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of our world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces and as psychological entities of massive power, planted the seeds of our world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In our terms those entities are our ancestors — and yet they are not ours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up our world.
It is easy to live — so easy that although we live, rest, create, respond, feel, touch, see, sleep and wake, we do not really have to try to do any of those things. From our viewpoint they are done for us.
They are done for us in Framed-Mind-2 — and further discussions of Framed-Mind-2, incidentally, will be inter-wound throughout my blogs. Our beliefs often tell us that life is hard, however, that living is difficult, that the universe, again, is unsafe, and that we must use all of our resources — not to meet life with anything like joyful abandon, or course, but to protect ourselves against its implied threats; threats that we have been taught to expect.
But our beliefs do not stop there. Because of both scientific and religious ones, in Western civilization we believe that there are threats from within also. As a result we forget our natural selves, and become involved in a secondary, largely imaginary culture: beliefs that are projected negatively into the future, individually and en masse. People respond with illnesses of one kind or another, or through exaggerated behavior.
Living is easy. It is safe and reliable because it is easy.