The waking state as we think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of our awareness, just as our physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.
The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to us in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.
When we examine the state of dreams, however, we do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. We try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are our usual criteria for judging events. Therefore, we are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when we “come awake” within our dreams — a matter we will discuss later in a future blog. But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that our own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization. We think our thoughts and we dream our dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.
Also, in a manner of speaking, we are ourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed our world into being. You must understand that I am not saying that we are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that we are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment — inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves. Spontaneity knows its own order.
The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward. In that regard, again, our dreaming state presents us with many clues about the source of our own lives and that of our world.
Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed processes. Nor can any amount of information “possessed” or processed by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument. The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing. It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.
We are subjectively “alive” before our birth. We will be subjectively alive after our death. Our subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that we call the waking one, in which we recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates. Our greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe. We create lives for ourselves, changing them as we go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots. The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which the creativity happens. The processes occur at another level of consciousness.
In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into physical one — and those processes happen at another level of consciousness.
Our body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal. The love of excitement and activity with which man and woman and animals are innately endowed. Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, and loved. They react in their own ways to suggestion, and in the regard our body consciousness responds to our conscious treatment of it. think of our body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal. Animals and our own body consciousnesses have little concept of age. In a fashion almost impossible to describe, those consciousnesses — of body and the animals — are ‘young’ in each moment of their existences. i am taking it fro granted that you understand that I am referring to the ‘mental attitude’ of animals and of the body consciousness, for they do possess their own mental attributes — psychological colorations — and above all, emotional ‘states’.
I largely oppose science’s mechanistic model of the body wearing down within certain age limits, abetted as that model is by the power of the beliefs that say it will. I will have much to say about how the out-of-place stresses we impose upon ourselves through our fearful projections into the future adversely affect our body consciousnesses, which are focused in the present. telepathy, “molecular mentality,” and cellular consciousness are deeply involved in all of this.
In the beginning, while men and women had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed of clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men and women could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.
The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course is had set itself upon. This awakening, again, happen spontaneously, and yet with its own order. In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man and woman did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man and woman’s did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man and woman still lingered in that dream reality.
The plants awakened before the animals — and their reasons for these varying degrees of ‘wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of species-hood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness. Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically effective world.
Again, the environment as we think of it is composed of living consciousness. Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what we think of as nature — the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and the rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land. The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.
In a matter of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a matter of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a matter of speaking, again, man and woman becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his and her own thoughts, man and woman in his and her way specializes in the conscious work of the world — a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him and her. And when he or she thinks, man and woman thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and molecules, for the smallest particles within his or her being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.
Man and woman thinks as naturally as the birds fly. He and she looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He and she is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes — but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.
What was it like when man and woman awakened from the dream world?